Sammendrag
The Fethullah Gülen movement or rather the Hizmet movement as his supporters prefer to call it, has grown from being a Turkish religious movement located in Turkey to a transnational movement that has been able to spread almost all over the world.
They are mostly famous because of their educational institutions that have been quite successful wherever they have been established. Being an advocate of interfaith and intercultural dialogue, the movement has focused on bridge-building between different cultures and religions all over the world. I believe this movement deserves more attention in regard to its “recipe” behind its worldwide success and not least when it comes to what their real mission is behind all of their world-wide activities.
I have chosen to focus on the movement in Norway and I have drawn a line to the movement in Turkey. My aim with this thesis is to find out whether the movement has had to change its strategies to be able to get established outside Turkey, in this case in Norway.
My findings indicate that the movement, both in Turkey and in Norway, is trying to establish what I would like to call a “Golden Empire” inspired by the Ottoman Empire and at the same time inspired by the Islamic “Golden Age” which was one of the greatest periods in Islamic history in terms of intellectual activity. To reach its goal of creating a Golden Empire, I argue that the movement aims to raise a “Golden Generation”, which is Gülen’s description of a future generation that is perfected through education and moral and which will have the important task of creating an ideal society and “save” the world from moral and spiritual decay in the future. So behind their dialogue and educational activities, lies the hope of creating a perfect generation that will carry on with the movement’s tasks and ideologies in the future.