How does the Gülen Movement enable citizens?
The Gülen Movement helps people to achieve their potential for autonomy and self-realization through a virtuous circle of mobility and exchange (of information, ideas and personnel) between the managers and the managed. There is a relationship between them of sustained mutual vigilance combined with mutual good faith and patience; they are willing, on occasions of unusual difficulty, to give each other the benefit of the doubt.
The Gülen Movement tries to provide for this individual autonomy along with harmonious integration of complexity and multiplicity. In this way it helps to prevent exclusion and marginalization, and the fracturing of society into conflicting interest groups, all operating in a climate of distrust and hostility. So the Gülen Movement gives individuals a voice in the civil area, a virtuous circle reliably linking the state with its people, the managed with their managers. The Gülen Movement’s positive service-ethic can be understood as an offer to mend the broken circle, to re-unite the society, and to heal divisions between society and state.
Through its discourse and actions the Gülen Movement has reawakened collective consciousness and directed attention to the radical social, cultural and spiritual dimensions of human needs, which the nation’s politics systematically ignores or obscures. In Turkey this contrasts with the authoritarian elite’s approach to the management of the nation’s development which has been consistently exclusionary. The elite imposes an order and reality solely of its own making. It often expresses its interpretation of reality with impatient disdain for the doubts and reservations of anyone who is concerned about how the elite’s imposed order causes a loss of cultural integrity and historical continuity.
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