Conceptualizing and understanding the Gulen movement

The Gulen movement (GM) is a controversial international Islamic movement originating in Turkey. Interestingly, the movement seems to be "in between" the standard conceptual categories used by social movement scholars: The GMs' focus on individual transformation and religious practices suggests that it is a religious movement; its extensive outreach into various institutions (i.e., education, health care, and media) suggests a social movement seeking legitimacy and broad social change; its purported infiltration of key government and military offices suggests a political movement. In this article, I demonstrate the utility of conceptualizing the GM as an everyday-life-based movement and of using a multi-institutional politics model to examine this type of movement. By doing so, it becomes clear that sometimes, movements focusing on individual change may also be seeking to transform social, economic, and political institutions.