The Gülen Movement is a controversial Turkish Muslim educational activist network with more than 1000 secular educational facilities across five continents. It seeks to create modern yet pious Muslims by melding the sciences with the spiritual. David Tittensor will talk about it and its mission, drawing on his work with movement teachers and graduates from the schools, and showing how the movement transmits its religious message through the cultivation of informal student networks that act as proxies for the teachers, thereby enabling the schools to maintain their secular orientation.

Dr. David Tittensor is Research Fellow to the UNESCO Chair for Cultural Diversity and Social Justice at Deakin University, Australia. His research interests are transnational Muslim movements, Turkish politics and society, and religion and development. He is the author of The House of Service: The Gülen Movement and Islam’s Third Way (Oxford University Press, 2014) and co-editor (with Matthew Clarke) of Islam and Development: Exploring the Invisible Aid Economy (Ashgate, 2014).