Monastic avoidance: Piety and ambivalence in pre-2016 Turkey

Abstract

Since the failed coup attempt in 2016, much academic attention has been devoted to the shadowy and now defunct political alliance between the AKP and the Hizmet community. Yet this scholarship only considers Hizmet as the level of its leadership and overlooks the core followers of Fethullah Gülen—mostly hard-working provincial schoolteachers and administrators. How did these individuals experience the movement’s controversial political dimensions (which were public for some years in advance of 2016) and make sense of it in the context of their daily lives of piety and hard work? In this paper, I present retrospective ethnographic observations from fieldwork undertaken in a Hizmet community in Turkey between 2013 and 2015 and argue for their relevance in understanding the community’s trajectory up to and including the present day. Specifically, I observe a tension in the lives of individuals who were committed to ethical Muslim living but were also implicated—if only through association with Fethullah Gülen—in Hizmet’s pre-2016 political agenda. Recent debates in the anthropology of Islam concerning the place of moral ambivalence in Muslim lives provide a starting point (Schielke 2010, Schielke and Debevec 2012, Fadil and Fernando 2015), whereafter I analyse Hizmet as a monastic community and argue that monastic practises allowed my interlocutors to balance competing empirical realities and maintain ethical coherence in their daily lives. I use the term ‘monastic avoidance’ to explain how Hizmet affiliates embedded themselves in tight-knit communities of piety in order to deflect their complicity in larger politico-religious projects that were associated with deception and illegality.