With tensions high in Turkey over the controversy with Fethullah Gulen, Murat Yuksel, a former University of Nevada, Reno professor, speaks out about his personal experiences with the situation.
“I’m sort of known in my local community among my relatives,” Yuksel starts, “you know your siblings know who you are and how you live. So, they’re alarmed that something harmful can happen to them because of me.”
While the situation seems bad, it might be worse than you imagine.
“The situation is like this, if you ever have some relation with Gulen himself OR some of the followers of him (in Turkey), you are actually sort of separated and isolated from the society. It’s unfortunately this bad. If you are living in a country like that I think you should keep it secret.
But here, I mean I always talk to my colleagues without shame that I have been listening to his sermons very regularly. I mean I like his thought, his principles. I find how he interprets Islamic thoughts and views really what we need against extremism. I think his views, if you read his books and listen to him, is the right way of understanding, in this day and age, of how to be a Muslim, a good person and a Muslim.”
He goes on to talk about how important education is in these teachings, “By being a good Muslim and contributing to good things; number one being education.”
Yuksel himself served as president on the board at the Coral Academy of Science in Reno, Nevada, and is still on the board today in another position.
“The reason I am involved in Coral Academy of Science is, or the reason, for example, I was involved in spending extra time of mine during the weekends or weeknights putting together thousand plus pages of a charter school application, was really truly trying to help local kids in their STEM education.”
He strongly believes that these schools are the future of America, and people should realize how needed they are.
“That’s a concern that’s been nationally recognized for easily more than a decade now, since Bush era actually. So, because of that if you want to open up a charter school or anything that can help the problem be solved, it’s all free.”
Yuksel, as a board member, tries to help in the field he is an expert in, engineering. As a board member, he says that everyone puts in whatever time and effort they want to, and tries to help by making connections in their fields of expertise. “I’ve tried to connect UNR administration with the school, although it was not very successful,” he laughed. “Another interesting fact about the board at Coral Academies is that all of their meetings are completely public. You should come in and see a public meeting.”
Although some of these schools are founded by people of Turkish descent, does that mean there is Turkish influence in these schools?
Yuksel defends the question by saying, “Turkish influence in Reno would be a lot to say. It’s maybe 200 people. The school, though, you may say so. In the sense that the school was originally founded by two graduate students at UNR, and both were PhD students back then.
They proposed the school and proposing a charter school is no easy task by the way, I did so back in New York.
Now, does Turkey have some influence? Since these two fellas were originally Turkish they had some influence and there are other schools with different influence,” he continues, “For example, the Bay Area, there are Greek founded schools, in other areas of California, there are Armenian origin people opening schools.
Now, Turkish influence, the level that I can see is there were Turkish elective classes offered that is the only main difference in terms of the curriculum, opposed from a normal public high school.”
Whether there is Turkish influence in these charter schools or not, the extremity of the situation in Turkey is getting worse daily.
“They even hired, given millions actually, to a law firm to open a judicial case against some of the charter schools here to find if they are laundering money or what not.”
Yuksel ends the discussion by saying, “They’re even now thinking about bringing back the death penalty in Turkey…. Unfortunately, it is not looking good.”
In time we will see whether or not Gulen gets extradited back to Turkey, if these charter schools are connected to him in any way, and how Hizmet followers will be treated, but as Yuksel said, “it’s not looking good”.