Making a new homeland: death, cemeteries, and the Hizmet movement in the U.S

Abstract Muslims who have experienced the disruption of forced migration often face difficult decisions as they age and contemplate death. Many Muslim immigrants have traditionally wanted to be repatriated to their homeland, but what happens when repatriation is not possible? This paper will discuss this quandary as experienced by members of the Turkish Gülen movement in Pennsylvania, where religious leader, Fethullah Gülen, lived in exile. The Turkish government holds Gülen and his followers responsible for the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey and has arrested thousands suspected to be part of the movement in Turkey. Movement members living abroad cannot return home, not even to be buried lest the Turkish government would mistreat their bodies by burying them in disgrace in Istanbul’s “Traitors’ Cemetery.” Such necropolitical punishment is meant to dehumanize movement members’ even in death, rendering them objects of curses. So Gülen community members, including Gülen himself, reconsider the final dispositions of their bodies, seeking new models to guide them in their decision-making about death in “gurbet” (a foreign place). This paper focuses on how cemetery establishment is a process by which the meanings of “homeland” and “gurbet” are reworked. That is, for movement members, Turkey has become associated with rejection and cursing and is thus a land of alienation. By investing in cemeteries and other institutions in the U.S. they attempt to turn the land of gurbet into a potential homeland (and ideally a land of blessings) for current migrants and for future generations.