Joshua Hendrick, a professor at Loyola University, is an expert on the Hizmet movement who recently caught up with our reporter, Laura Gattis, over the phone.
Q: Can you briefly explain the Gulen/Hizmet movement?
A: Briefly? *chuckles* The Hizmet movement, or Gulen as it’s more commonly known, is essentially a spin-off of a pre-existing religious community that extends back hundred of years. This movement was based on Said Nursi and his teachings. They are in every which way a direct offshoot of Nursi's teachings. Turkish youth enter sciences and math, or STEM classes, because Hizmet allows them to do so in a way that parallels the “Nursi state of Islam.”
Q: For my class, we are researching Coral Academies in Nevada. Why does his movement have ties to so many STEM schools?
A: It's a matter of how the religious schools are portrayed to the public. Around the world, they aren't marketed as schools associated with a pious education, just as being successful in math and science. They are uniquely successful here because of their ability to take advantage of charter funding. Other similar schools in other countries are private, whereas acquiring charter funding here is relatively easy for them. Their ability to produce high-quality product, as measured on standardized exams, this facilitates a branding of their educational branding around the world and the local charter as effective methods of teaching.
Most of the criticism they face are alarmist Islamophobic, and are from people who are unnerved by Islam as a whole, and not the school itself.
Q: Do you think he will be extradited back to Turkey anytime soon? The US/Turkey extradition is a tricky subject.
A: The US/Turkey extradition is a legally binding document and Turkey has to create a subsidy to make their case for extradition and the reality is that it's difficult to produce the documents that would prove Gulen was tied to the events of July 2016.