Women teachers at the Gülen community schools in Turkey: An ethnographic study

Duygun Gokturk, Purdue University

Abstract

Since the Gülen community has been accepted as a global religious social phenomenon, the suspicion people have about the new form of Islamic activism introduced by the Gülen has served to further research about the autonomous inner characteristics of the Community. The Community's emerging form of activism is mostly defined as a synthesis of politics and culture, Islam and science, modernity and tradition. In addition, the Community opened up a space for strengthening faith and reviving Islam while avoiding strong ideological commitments without dismissing an adaptation to current political agendas through its moderate and pro-democratic discourse. Within this arena, the public visibility of religious practices in everyday life is deployed by the Community as a hegemonic project in order to construct moral selves and to cultivate attitudes and habits in accord with a modern pious character. The role of women in terms of their presence and engagement with the Community discourses is essential to integrating the analysis of everyday life into the emerged alternative hegemonic projects. In this study, my examination of a Gülen community school located in a rural, peripheral province of western Turkey aims to contribute to the understanding of how the increasing appeal of Islamic communities generates gender-related social change as a function of this alternative hegemonic project. In light of this concern, I explain the increasing appeal of Islamist communities in public spaces in terms of their conditions and motives of existence. One of my central motivations involves the fact that although there is extensive literature about the Gülen community, the Community's gender politics have remained largely overlooked. I think the gender politics of the Community are essential for viewing gender relations and religious authority both within Islamist communities and throughout Turkish society. This research contributes to tracing the contours of the return of public Islam and conservative traditions in Turkey today. This study analyzes the Gülen community's gender politics in Turkey through an ethnographic, conversation-based account of the female teachers at one of the Gülen community schools, Fatih College, in a peripheral rural city in western Turkey. In this study, considering the Community's role in forming everyday life politics and the way it frames and activates its relationship with the state, the concepts of Gramsci's culture of hegemony and Foucault's art of governmentality are used to trace the gender politics of the Community, the mobilization model of the Community, and the emergent non-confrontational interaction between the Community's religion-based politics and the state.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Samarapungavan, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Womens studies|Education Policy|Islamic Studies|School administration|Religious education

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