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>> 123 5 Education If we are able to implant in the young firm belief, pure and sound thoughts, a strong feeling of love of nation and country ; if we enable them to come together around a sacred cause to which they should be made to dedicate themselves; if we bring them to prefer such values as honor and dignity over passing pleasures; and if we inculcate in them the duty of loyalty to the country and working for its good . . . then the young will maintain their essential identity against mental and spiritual corruption. —M. Fethullah Gülen Although constituting a growing faith community in the 1970s, the GM’s institutional mobilization could not have expanded were it not for deeply penetrating transformations that ensued in the aftermath of the 1980–1983 junta. As noted previously, Turkey’s turn toward liberalization and market competition in this period was a necessary precondition for the GM’s shift from a modestly sized faith community to a transnationally active and powerful advocacy community. Indeed, during this period, the state’s monopoly over the hearts and minds of Turkey’s youth eroded, and new actors emerged to compete for youth attention. The GM excelled in this competition by mastering the Turkish education system and the opportunities presented therein. GM followers built private for-profit schools that filled a market demand for high-quality, low-student-to-teacher-ratio science and math education. They built student dormitories and bought student-intended apartments to re-create the sense of community that first developed in the late 1960s. Offering an alternative form of Turkish nationalism to Turkish and global consumers, education became the key sector in the GM’s transnational advocacy campaign. 124 > 125 who will want to deprive you of this treasure. If one day you find yourself forced into the position to defending the independence and the republic, in order to take up duty at once, you should not think about the contingencies and the constraints of the situation in which you find yourself. These contingencies and constraints may manifest themselves in very inconvenient ways. The enemies who will have designs against your independence and republic might be the representatives of a victory never seen before in the world. By force and intrigue, all the fortresses of the dear country may have been captured, all the shipyards penetrated, all the armies dispersed, and every corner of the country actually taken over. Even sadder and graver than all these conditions, with the country, those who are in power might be inept or astray or even traitorous. Furthermore, those in power might unite their personal interests with the political aims of the invaders. The nation might be desolate and exhausted in destitution. Harken, children of the future. So even under such conditions and situations your duty is: to rescue Turkish independence and the republic. The power you need is present in the noble blood in your veins. (Quoted in Parla and Davidson 2004, 205) The protection of the Turkish state, of Turkish society in general, was placed on the shoulders of the “Turkish youth,” to the “children of the future,” to whom their national patriarch proclaimed to speak eternally. Kemal’s message focused less on those listening to his words, than it did on Turkey’s future populations. It was their responsibility to uphold the sanctity and sovereignty of the Republic. Since the Nutuk’s first utterance, Turkey’s youth has been “devoted to preserving the result of his [Kemal’s] energies.” The effective result is that, to one degree or another, youth in Turkish society is “his youth . . . their upbringing in their formative years will be shaped and constituted following his lead. They shall forever be his offspring” (Parla and Davidson 2004, 207). The sociological impact of this technology of national identity is that regardless of one’s social class, religious persuasion, or regional heritage , and regardless of one’s acceptance of Kemalist notions of Turkish laiklik, youth populations are inculcated at a very young age with the notion that their nation’s prosperity is their responsibility, and that their 126 > 127 unlearn their particular experience of family and community in order to become part of the universal, national experience. In Turkey, Kaplan (2006) explains that equally important to Gramsci is the work of Foucault, whose notion of “discourse” is useful for understanding the ways in which “regimes of truth” create boundaries for the construction of human knowledge. “Discourse,” in this sense, refers to the ensemble of...

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