By: Sharon Higgins,
It requires an ongoing effort to even minimally understand the Gulen movement, the secretive and controversial religious group which operates the largest charter school network in the United States. Details about this group’s structure, recruitment and control of members, were recently presented by Fuad Aliyev in “The Gulen Movement in Azerbaijan” (12/27/2012).
His article appeared in Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, a publication of the Hudson Institute’s Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World. Aliyev is a Fulbright Scholar at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
His article appeared in Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, a publication of the Hudson Institute’s Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World. Aliyev is a Fulbright Scholar at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus, a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia [see maps below]. It has enormous energy reserves, including one of the largest natural gas fields in the world, the Shah Deniz II. Only discovered in 1999, this field will be the origin point for the Nabucco gas pipeline, a project being planned that will bring the first gas ever from the Caspian Sea basin to Europe, via Turkey. Construction has not yet commenced, but if built, the Nabucco pipeline will be one of the largest engineering projects in the world. Some estimates say it will be operational by 2017. The Nabucco will join the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to a Turkish port on the Mediterranean, a project that was first proposed in 1992 and completed in 2005.
The Gulen movement opened its first school in Azerbaijan in 1992. This was first school it opened outside of Turkey (see this article about its 20th anniversary from a Gulenist news source). The movement had expanded into Azerbaijan immediately after independence was attained in 1991 as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As Aliyev wrote, “Since the arrival of the [Gulen movement] in Azerbaijan, it has made a targeted effort to recruit the children of the country’s elite into their education institutions.” It has been reported that the offspring of many influential Azerbaijani officials are attending these schools.
Given the timing and other indicators, something to ponder is if interests in these newish energy sources in which Turkey is an integral player might have some bearing on our government’s unique relationship with Fethullah Gulen and his increasingly powerful group of intensely business-oriented followers. Is this somehow tied to the generous funding continually being provided to the Gulen movement for its charter school expansion? Is it tied to the strange silence from US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other members of our government about the fact that a secretive and controversial religious group from a foreign country is operating so many charter schools (none in 1998, two in 1999, and now 135)? Is our government enabling the Gulen charter school expansion as some sort of quid pro quo? There is an enormous amount of information which should be presented to the American public so that this large subject can be opened up for a much wider level of discussion.