Revolt within the ranks: Bureaucratisation and contestation among Gülen’s followers in the diaspora

Abstract Although the recently deceased Turkish Islamic preacher, Fethullah Gülen, was the founding figure and undisputed leader of the Hizmet community for half a century, he was not the community’s sole source of authority. As Hizmet expanded, authority and decision-making capacity were increasingly embedded in an intricate, hierarchical set of structures and procedures—that is, in a bureaucracy. The contours of this bureaucracy were shaped and formed by its surrounding ideological and institutional topography, first in Turkey where the community emerged, and later, as Hizmet spread across the globe, in different national localities. Focused on the aftermath of the dramatic 2016 coup attempt, this article explores the sedulous, challenging and conflict-ridden labour through which some of Gülen’s followers tried to reform and refine Hizmet’s bureaucratic structures and procedures with an eye, both to Islamic normative teachings and to the (neo-)liberal doctrines of transparency and accountability which prevail, in different shapes and forms, in the community’s new Euro-American heartlands. Far from a stable monolith, the article thus depicts Hizmet as a living social entity rife with internal differences and continuously modulated in dialectic interplay with broader socio-political forces.