Travel as hicret: (Re)framing experiences of exile in the gülen community in Brazil

Abstract

This article analyzes how members of the Gülen community in Brazil have mobilized the Islamic tradition in order to make reason of critical changes in their lives, since July 2016 failed coup in Turkey. This community is part of the Gülen Movement, a transnational Turkish Islamic network that operates mainly through educational and cultural activities. The Movement’s charismatic religious leader, Fethullah Gülen, was held responsible for the failed putsch and its participants have since been persecuted by the Turkish government both at home and abroad. The article shows how Gülen’s discursive articulation of the notions of hizmet (religious service) and hicret has been mobilized by his followers settled in Brazil as an Islamic framework that provides them with moral reasoning to carry on in what they define as the Prophet’s path. It also shows that changes in economic and political context may lead to different motivations and objectives in one’s trajectory, producing a reconfiguration of meanings related to travel, migration and diaspora.