An important issue to consider in investigating the impact of the Gülen Movement on East-West encounters is gender, particularly regarding religious expertise and leadership. Most contributors to the expanding scholarship on gender and the Gülen Movement have evaluated Fethullah Gülen’s views on women as simultaneously traditional and progressive. Gülen encourages modesty for both men and women, including head coverings for women, while acknowledging women’s freedom of choice as part of his rejection of all forms of oppression and his recognition of the Qur’anic injunction: “There is no compulsion in religion,” and advocating for women’s access to higher education and employment. Movement affiliates practice various degrees of gender segregation. They, like Sufi orders and other reformed Sufi groups, maintain parallel, but separate practices for men and women. Publicly invisible, but accessible to interested non-affiliates, their weekly gender-segregated gatherings, or sohbetler (spiritual conversations), encourage both men and women equally to pursue spiritual advancement, achieve religious expertise, exercise leadership and perform hizmet (service). While men commonly serve in positions of high public visibility situated at the interface between the affiliate community and surrounding society, women’s hizmet opportunities for assisting others and promoting education, understanding and ethical values are expansive. Drawing on Gülen’s works and interviews with US women affiliates, my paper highlights their conscious interpretation and application of Gülen’s ideals in constructing the parameters of their roles in their lives, by offering an alternative assessment of their access to expertise and leadership, articulated at work, at university and in other contexts through hizmet, which constitutes the central focus of the movement and a significant location of their local East-West encounters.

Margaret J. Rausch, currently an independent scholar, has taught in Religious Studies at the University of Kansas and in Islamic Studies from the Free University of Berlin, where she received her PhD. With research interests include Sufism, women, ritual, religious education, religious authority, she has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Morocco, Tajikistan, Turkey and diasporic communities in the U.S. Her publications include Islam in Practice: Ishelhin (Berber) Women, Poetry Chanting and Islamic Education in the Sous Region of Southwestern Morocco, under review with Syracuse University Press, Muslim Women’s Rituals: Gender and Authority in the Islamic World, co-authored with Copenhagen University Professor Catharina Raudvere, under contract with I.B. Tauris, Bodies, Boundaries and Spirit Possession: Moroccan Women and the Revision of Tradition (Transcript Verlag, 2000), and Elements of Modern Literary Arabic, co-authored with Frederic Cadora and Munir Al-Aseer (Ohio State University Press, 1980) as well as journal articles and book chapters.