Wednesday, October 07, 2009

WHO SPEAKS FOR ISLAM IN THE US?


“You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers, until the conditions are ripe."

~ Fethullah Gülen.


I came across something interesting the other day that I first noticed in an unusual place, the details of which are another story. However, there is a new book published called Who Speaks for Islam? It's the published results of a poll conducted by the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. The woman in charge of that center is Dalia Mogahed who was mentioned in Sunday Zaman as the Obama's appointee to the White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Mogahed was quoted in Zaman as saying:


. . . [T]he Gülen movement, a faith-based social movement named after Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, is a model and inspiration for all those working for the good of the society.


The guy who writes the book with her is John Esposito. He edited a book with Hakan Yavuz on the "Gülen Movement". Hakan Yavuz is running the Armenian Genocide denial program at the University of Utah, which Luke Ryland noted back in May. The Middle East Center at U of U, under which Yavuz's Armenian Genocide denial project falls, is also involving itself in the Kurdish issue through its PhD program (See page 5), notably mentioning one of their candidates as Emrullah Uslu, who claims to be a "terrorism expert" in the Turkish press, but that may be because he's police. Uslu publishes articles at a wide variety of websites, including the pro-terrorist Jamestown Foundation and Taraf.

Yavuz is also connected to the wider Turkish lobby system in the US, which continues to spread big bucks around--especially if the big bucks are meant to fuel Armenian Genocide denial. At this Turkish Cultural Foundation (TCF) page, under the grantee listings for 2007, there are two grants to the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) listed, one for $150,000 and another for $750,000. These were passed to Hakan Yavuz's Armenian Genocide denial program at the U of U. That's a grand total of $900,000, almost $1 million. Here's a CV for Yavuz. Under "Grants" about midway down, we see that the TCA handed over the $900,000 in 2009. Here's a mailing list page from the U of U political science faculty notifying everyone that the grant was approved for Yavuz:


Second, Hakan Yavuz has just been notified that his proposal titled "Memory, Migration and Trauma" was awarded $900,000 from the Turkish Cultural Foundation to advance Turkish Studies at the University of Utah. This award is through the Middle East Center and College of Humanities and will provide funds to support scholarship, conferences, graduate students, and community outreach related to the topic of the shaping of Turkish identity in the Republic of Turkey.


The Turkish Studies Project at the U of U doesn't want you to know that its funding originally came from the TCF, though; it issued a retraction of the fact here. Isn't that strange, especially when it was listed so prominently on Hakan Yavuz's own CV and announced through email to the political science faculty at the U of U?

It might be worth remembering that Utah and the Fethullahçı were linked to "electronic leakage" in a campaign to "harm the prestige" of the TSK. Now with the information about the $900,000 grant from the TCF to the TCA to the U of U, we can see that these Turkish groups have a network of their own in the US and the usual principle of Islamist v Secularist don't totally apply.

There's another tidbit to this story: Who was it that was among those luminaries who wrote reference letters for Fethullah Gülen when he was asking for a green card? John Esposito.

There we have Daria Mogahed and John Esposito neatly wrapped in the Fethullahçı web and, by now, most of you are probably wondering if I'm ever going to make a point. I am.

Daria Mogahed is making some tours of World Affairs Councils in the US to speak about Who Speaks for Islam? and not only in San Francisco, but in Montana and Florida.

So who's going to speak for Islam in the US? Fethullah Gülen.

7 comments:

Thompson said...

Yavuz is against the Gulen movement now:
“It is a political movement ... and it has always been political. They think power is very important. They want to train an elitist class which will then turn Turkey into a center of the religious world, Islamize the country,” said Hakan Yavuz, a professor of political science at the University of Utah.

“It is the most powerful movement right now in the country. They are powerful in the media, the Ministry of Education and the police force... The point where they are today scares me. There is no other movement to balance them in society.”
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=141911

Anonymous said...

I don't understand how you depicted taraf as pro-terrorist? Would you please explain a little further? Am I missing something?

Mizgîn said...

So Yavuz has gone all Nurettin Veren on Gulen, eh? That's interesting. We'll have to watch that and see what happens. Thanks for the link.

Anonymous, I was referring to the Jamestown Foundation as pro-terrorist, not Taraf.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Mizgin, for this update to your March 5 post.

"I have established a new series to be published at the University of Utah Press since 2005," writes Yavuz in his CV, adding that he "solicited these manuscripts and was involved in every process of publication during the last several years."

With authors like Justin McCarthy and Guenter Lewy, to name only two in this genocide-denialist series, Ankara's propaganda publishing industry seems to have acquired its very own American academic imprint.

Mizgîn said...

Yes, Anonymous, the U of U publishes a lot of denier books. What may be even more scary is that Justin McCarthy has a resource book published for teachers at the secondary education level. I think the teacher's guide was published around 2003 and I wonder if it might have been McCarthy's contribution to the battle between the ATAA and the Massachusetts schools in Griswold v Driscoll.

The denial program at U of U has a connection to the TBMM, too: Sukru Elekdag, former Turkish ambassador to the US.

It looks like the Greeks aren't too happy with U of U, either.

gundemexperi said...

Fethullah Gülen’s contribution to Muslim-Christian dialogue in the context of Abrahamic cooperation (P. Valkenberg)

http://fethullahgulenconference.org/houston/read.php?p=fethullah-gulen-contribution-muslim-christian-dialogue-abrahamic-cooperation

The Gülen Movement: A Sociological Analysis of a Civic Movement Rooted in Moderate Islam

http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%BClen-Movement-Sociological-Analysis-Moderate/dp/1402098936

Mizgîn said...

Thanks for the religious propaganda, Kerem.

If it's any religion, it's all the same SHIT.