Islam and the Turkic Legacy: The Nurcu Movement
The Islamic revival in the Volga region has also prompted reflections on the region’s Turkic cultur-al legacy and identity, as well as on the interaction between the ethnic components of this Turkic legacy and Islam globally. Since the early 1990s the Volga region has witnessed the penetration of religious groups of Turkish origin, the first and largest of which was the Nurcu movement.
The original Nurcu movement was founded by Bediuzzaman Sa’id-i Kurdi (1878–1960), also known as Sa’id-i Nursi, after Turkey’s war of independence. Sa’id-i Nursi voiced his support for
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The most powerful of these offshoots is the neo-Nurcu Fethullahcilar (Fethullah Gülen’s Fol-lowers) movement led by Fethullah Gülen, who was born in Erzurum in 1942. Gülen has had a complicated and controversial relationship with Turkish authorities. In 1971 the Turkish security service arrested him “for clandestine religious activities, such as running illegal summer camps to indoctrinate youths...”82After that he was occasionally harassed, and in 1998 he left Turkey for the United States.83In 2000 Turkish authorities accused him of promoting insurrection in Turkey; the indictment against him emphasized “the silent and deep penetration” of his movement into the Turkish military, which was at that time the guarantor of the secular nature of the Turkish repub-
79. Farid Salman, “Rassuzhdeniya o razlichiyah mezhdy wahhabizmomi traditsionnym islamom” [Reasoning on the differences between Wahhabism and traditional Islam], Interfax News Agency, November 15, 2011. http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=analysis&div=168.
80. Sukhran Vahide, Islam in Modern Turkey: An Intellectual Biography of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2005).
81. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs denies the existence of an organization called the “Nurcu,” stressing that different followers of Sa’id-i Nursi engage in different practices and activities. In accordance with Turkish legislation, o_cial registration of religious sects is prohibited. Thus any structures a_liated with the “Nurcu” have no registration in Turkey’s Interior Ministry.
82. Rachel Sharon-Krespin, “Fethullah Gülen’s Grand Ambition. Turkey’s Islamist Danger,” Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2009): 55–66.
83. Ibid.
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lican state. In 2006, however, all charges against him were dropped; the Supreme Court of Appeals subsequently confirmed the decision in 2008. Also in 2008, he was voted by readers of the journal Foreign Policy as “a leading intellectual of the world.84As Rachel Sharon-Krespin noted, “many in the West applaud him as a reformist and advocate for tolerance, a catalyst of ‘moderate Islam’ for Turkey and beyond.”85In contrast to the Salafis, the Fethullahcilar movement suggests a focus on understanding Islam through education. According to one of Gülen’s statements,
The philosophy of our service is that we open a house somewhere and, with the patience of a spider, we lay our web to wait for people to get caught in the web; and we teach those who do. We don’t lay the web to eat or consume them but to show them the way to their resur-rection, to blow life into their dead bodies and souls, to give them a life.86
Gülen considers the primary task of the Fethullahcilar not to be in conflict with o_cial policy but rather to form “the Islamic worldview”; additionally, the movement interprets armed jihad as a mistake and an extreme form of the struggle.87For these reasons, the Turkish journal-ist Emre Aköz called Fethullahcilar “the education jihad.”88Bayram Balci, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, notes that these schools are secular “but striv[e] indirectly and moraliz[e] with the spreading of a moderated Islam and an Islam highly mixed with Turkish nationalism.”89He adds, “Fethullah’s aim is the Islamization of Turkish nationality and the Turcifi-cation [sic] of Islam in foreign countries.”90
Though the linkages between the Fethullahcilar and the Turkish state are complicated and cannot be identified with o_cial approaches, Ankara considers the activity of this neo-Nurcu movement useful for the promotion of Turkish national interests. The movement therefore bene-fits from the support of the Turkish embassies. Between the 1990s and the early 2000s Fethullacilar opened 24 special schools, one university, one university department, and three language institutes in Russia. In March 1993 the Bashkortostan Ministry of Education signed an agreement with the Turkish company Serhat to facilitate the launch of a number of Bashkir–Turkish educational insti-tutions—specifically, schools and charity lyceums. Four lyceums were opened in Ufa, Sterlitamak, Sibai, and Neftekamsk, where about 1,000 students have been taught. As a rule, the principals and teachers at these institutions have been members of Fethullahcilar. Numerous Turkish-originated
84. “Interview: Fethullah Gülen; Meet Foreign Policy’s Top Public Intellectual of 2008,” Foreign Policy, August 13, 2008. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2008/08/13/interview_fethullah_guelen.
85. Rachel Sharon-Krespin, “Fethullah Gülen’s Grand Ambition.”
86. “AKP’s Political Power Base,” Inquiry and Analysis no. 375, MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), July 19, 2007.
87. See Magomed Gaziyev, Chaepitiya v istinnom svete” [The Tea-Parties under the real light], September 24, 2009, http://i-r-p.ru/page/stream-document/index-25312.html.
Just after the September 11, 2001, tragedy, Gülen stated: “We condemn in the strongest of terms the latest terrorist attack on the United States of America, and feel the pain of the American people at the bottom of our hearts. Islam abhors such acts of terror. . . . No terrorist can be a Muslim, and no true Muslim can be a terrorist.” See Halit Kara, “Importance of Gulen Movement in the Post 9/11 Era: Co-existence” http://www. fethullah-gulen.org/op-ed/gulen-movement-9-11.html
88. Emre Aköz, “Müslüman misyonerler” [Muslim missionaries], Sabah (Istanbul), December 30, 2004. 89. Bayram Balci, “Islam and globalization in post-Soviet Central Asia and
Caucasus,” April 1, 2007, http://www.reseau-asie.com/edito-en/reseau-asie-s-editorial/
islam-and-globalization-in-post-soviet-central-asia-and-caucasus-by-bayram-balci-director-of-the-ins/. 90. Bayram Balci, “Fethullah Gulen’s Missionary Schools in Central Asia and Their Role in the
Spreading of Turkism and Islam,” Religion, State & Society 31, no. 2 (2003): 156.
26 |the rise of radical and nonofficial islamic groups in russia’s volga region
schools have also opened in Tatarstan—eight in total in Naberezhnye Chelny, Almetyevsk and Kazan—as well as in Chuvashia and the Orenburg region. A Turkish cultural-educational center was founded in Nizhny Novgorod at the Linguistics University. Serhat provided financial support, as did the Tolerance Foundation, a Gülenist-dialogue organization founded in 1996.
However, since the late 1990s many disturbing signals concerning the educational content at these institutions have become the subject of discussion in the media. Various newspapers have reprinted the story of an ethnic Russian woman from Almetyevsk talking about her son’s educa-tion in the Tatar-Turkish lyceum:
Almetyevsk is mostly a Tatar city. I gave my permission for him to be taught in this lyceum because of the quality of education and because some other schools were so expensive. Ini-tially the changes in my son’s behavior seemed harmless. He stayed at the lyceum overnight and visited the mosque. Then he started to ask me why my skirt is above the knee or my head is uncovered. Then he demanded to take away our Orthodox icons. There were scan-dals as a result. At last I took him away from this lyceum.91
Since the early 2000s, Russian law-enforcement agencies, educational o_cials, and the FSB have interfered in the activities of these Turkish educational institutions. In the summer of 2002 in Bashkortostan, the people educated at one such institution were detained as suspects in ex-tremist activity. Subsequent special inspections found that many of the teachers at these lyceums and schools had no special qualifications or experience. They also uncovered that many of these teachers had violated the legislation concerning the stay of foreigners on Russian territory. In 2001 the principal of the Neftekamsk Bashkir-Turkish Lyceum, Omar Qavaqly, was deported from the country for such abuses. That same year, 20 members of Fethullahcilar were also forced to leave Russia. In 2002 the Bashkortostan Ministry of Education terminated its Agreement with Serhat. On December 15, 2002, then–FSB director Nikolai Patrushev, in a meeting with leading Russian media, made an o_cial statement on Nurcu activity related to intelligence tasks.92
In 2005 in Naberezhnye Chelny, some people supposedly connected with the neo-Nurcu movement were prosecuted under Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code for incitement of national, racial, or religious hatred. Finally, on May 21, 2007, Moscow’s Koptevskiy court recog-nized some Russian translations of the Risale-i Nur materials as extremist. According to the court statement, these works contained “signs of extremism, in particular, incitement to religious hatred, propaganda of exclusivity, superiority and inferiority of citizens on the basis of their religion.”93In 2008 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, following a lawsuit prepared by the O_ce of the Prosecutor General and supported by the Ministry of Justice and the FSB, banned the activities of the Nurcu movement in Russia.
Still, neo-Nurcu activities continued. In April 2009, the prosecutor’s o_ce of the Lenin district
91. Konstantin Gusev, “Velikiy Turan v Nizhegorodskoi oblasti” [The Great Turan in Nizhniy Novgorod Oblast], March 31, 2011, http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2011/03/m245340.htm.
92. “FSB raskryla turetskuyu sektu, kotaraya zanimalas’ shpionazhem” [FSB uncovered the Turkish sect, which was engaged in espionage], December 16, 2002, http://www.orthomed.ru/news.php?id=3283.
93. “Verkhovnyi Sud zapretil organizatsiyu Nurcular” [The Supreme Court prohibited Nurcu organization], April 11, 2008, http://ru-news.ru/art_desc.php?aid=906.
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of Ufa found extremist literature (Nursi’s works) in the library of the Russian Islamic University of the CSBM. In September 2011, the court in Ulyanovsk sentenced an Azerbaijani citizen, Rashid Abdulov, to one year of corrective labor for inciting religious hatred. According to the investiga-tion, he founded the Nurcu cell in the region and managed to engage with the imam of the Uly-anovsk Mosque, Ilham Hisanutdinov. In October of the same year, the Leninsky District Court of Nizhniy Novgorod passed a guilty verdict against the six members of a Nurcu cell. Gülenists still operate several schools in Russia, but some prosecutors and judges have targeted them for extrem-ist ties also. The problem lies in the fact that these groups are promoting nono_cial Islam, which the o_cial structures dislike.
According to historian Aislu Yunusova,
It should be noted that with respect to the Nurcu there is no definitive evaluation of its religious leaders among scholars and o_cials. Many people tend to consider the teachings of Nursi as the teachings of a moderate theologian and reformer and, as a result, they miss the facts that his ideas contribute to the spread of religious extremism. Thus, in the Muslim community, rumors still persist that the police are pursuing not an extremist group but purely ordinary believers, as does the perception that all charges against Serhat are associ-ated with the competition for high school students and nothing to do with the fight against extremism.94