Sign up for the zoom link: Surviving the Purge: Challenges of the Sufism-Inspired Hizmet/Gulen Movement
Date and time: November 24, 2022, 16:00-18:00 EET/Helsinki time
Speaker: Professor Sophia Pandya, California State University Long Beach
Venue: Room U3039, Main University Building, Unioninkatu 34, University of Helsinki AND Zoom
Abstract: This talk analyzes the Hizmet/Gulen Movement, its origin and history in Turkey, and the wide-reaching projects it has carried out at the international level. Since the July 15, 2016, coup attempt, Turkish President Erdogan has launched a purge against those he deemed his opposition. In particular, he blamed the failed coup on the Movement. The subsequent crackdown has had devastating consequences for Movement participants, with thousands fired, jailed, and forced to flee the country. How does this faith community make meaning out of their collective trauma, and how will they rebuild?
Speaker's Bio:
Sophia Pandya is a professor and department chair at California State University at Long Beach, in the Department of Religious Studies. Winner of the 2016 Advancement of Women Award at CSULB from the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, she received her BA from UC Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies/Arabic, and her MA and PhD from UC Santa Barbara in Religious Studies. A Fulbright Scholar, she specializes in women and Islam, and more broadly in contemporary movements within Islam. Dr. Pandya has authored a book (2012), Muslim Women and Islamic Resurgence: Religion, Education, and Identity Politics in Bahrain, on Bahraini women and the ways in which globalization and modern education impacted their religious activities. Having carried out research in Turkey on several occasions, she is also the co-editor of a second published volume (2012), The Gülen Hizmet Movement and its Transnational Activities: Case Studies on Charitable Activism. Dr. Pandya has also published about the Hizmet movement and its relationship to the Kurdish community, “Hizmet Educational Institutions and the Kurdish Community: Assimilation vs. Identity Politics,” and an article about family and gender in wartime Yemen, “The War Took Us Backwards”: Yemeni Families and Dialectical Patriarchal Reordering.” She is currently working on a book on the stories of Turkish refugees, and the meanings they find or construct from their ordeal.
