Şerif Mardin's analyses of Fethullah Gülen

With the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) giving this year's grand award in the field of Social and Human Sciences to Şerif Mardin, Mardin's study of Said Nursi, which led to his being turned away three times from the same door, and, on top of that, his academic interest in Fetullah Gülen have come to the agenda again. It is an indisputable fact that Mardin always successfully maintained toward his academic object the distance that a social scientist must have.

He looks at Muslim communities, the Nur followers and Islamic developments truly as an outsider. This outsiderness registers his works somewhat under orientalism.

Dr. Alim Arlı

wrote a separate book that deals with the orientalism/occidentalism dimension of his approaches. In fact, Mardin's orientalism is not something very strange. Academic interest in Islamic communities or the East inevitably makes someone looking from outside an orientalist.

What is important is how aware the person is of the orientalist epistemology he is in as an ontological reality, and whether he has an idea of its share in the knowledge he produces.

Truth be told, we can say that Mardin had an extra merit in knowing his own limits regarding his field of study.

I personally never felt that Mardin made a special effort to polish Nursi in his study of Said Nursi

. On the contrary, what I saw was an ordinary social science practice that tries to understand a movement with significant social resonance in Turkey, tries to decipher its mentality codes, and does not pass judgment on the object of research while doing so.

A social scientist does not pass judgment on the truth or falsity of the ideas and beliefs of the people he studies.

If he does, he expresses himself directly as a party facing that reality, as a part of that reality.

Of course, some people's expectation was that, now that Mardin's hand was on it, he would try to prove how reactionary and how bigoted Said Nursi was. But what would then be done would have not the slightest thing to do with social science.

We know that Şerif Mardin deeply desired to study Fetullah Gülen and his movement as he had studied Said Nursi, but that this desire remained fruitless without being realized.

In the midst of the struggle against FETÖ, we had said that we would have a few words to say on this occasion to those who try to find or suggest connections between Mardin and Gülen. On the occasion of the TÜBA award given to Mardin, as Mardin's entire record is being laid out, some people have gone and attributed to him the role of preparing the theoretical infrastructure of Fetullahism.

Whether Mardin, knowingly or unknowingly, was within any project to study the Gülen movement or to prepare it for a mission, we cannot know, but we know that a sociological eye cannot ignore the existence of the Gülen movement, which had gradually turned into a serious phenomenon in Turkey.

No serious sociologist can overlook a movement that had reached a serious level of organization and sociality in nearly all of the country's institutions and fields and had gained excessive visibility.

Humbly, already in 1997, in my doctoral thesis completed at METU, I gave the movement two sections in order to take its situation of that day as a basis.

While studying it, it was also possible to take an honest path between lauding it and demonizing it, and I tried to do that.

Even so, I recorded, as findings, the special effort the movement displayed to distinguish itself from the other mainstream Muslim circles, how it had adopted taqiyya toward both the state and the other communities as a way, and the ambivalent situations brought about by its being thoroughly entangled with politics to the end while disparaging politics. Truth be told, in my subsequent observations too I have not obtained different data that would change my findings on this.

The very reasons that led Mardin to research Said Nursi and Nur followers also led him to study Fetullah Gülen and his movement.

But after a certain stage, as a sociologist, by confessing his incapacity to understand and explain this movement, he in my view left a very important note in the history of sociological method as well. Because

he had determined that the Gülen movement, in its present form, has a structure that spoils all the data a sociological study could collect

. Faced with the scale of taqiyya and secrecy, Mardin was compelled in 2010, in an interview he gave to Ruşen Çakır, to say "I could not figure out this movement." As for the reason, he expressed it as

"When one looks at the Fetullah community, one should not look at its internal organization, you will not find it. It is not a glue that lends itself to being researched with the methods we have used until now."

As a way of sociological work, although he stayed 4 months in the US in an environment that included Gülenists, the most important thing he understood was that this movement had a different glue and that understanding it was not that easy. Subsequently,

in the interview he would give to Neşe Düzel

too, with similar statements, it was interesting enough that he emphasized more the things he did not understand and could not explain than the things he understood about Gülen.

This is, in a way, a reflection of the ideal humility of a social scientist looking at a social event from the outside.

Rather than setting out to explain everything with half-baked knowledge, pointing out the areas he does not know or may find it hard to know is, to my mind, a big enough virtue.

Let us also note that the Gülenists, who are already complex enough as a social movement, have, in their extra efforts at managing perceptions about themselves, an effect that completely falsifies sociological data. I had pointed out this situation earlier under the title "The community's perception management: Mirror, mirror, tell me, is there anyone better than me?"

The structure, which had turned PR work, as an application of taqiyya, into an entirely separate specialization, displayed special efforts to produce the perception it wanted about itself, while managing to hide its real agenda, its face, its intention from view. That is why a sociologist like Mardin, who tries to look from the outside and understand, not having understood the Gülen movement is not his deficiency; on the contrary, his having seen and pointed to the existence of a reality different from what was presented to him is a merit that shows the maturity of his social-scientific effort.