Ibrahim A. Anli

Indeed, Fethullah Gulen's story is a distingushably Turkish one, yet not exclusively so. The last 20 years of Gulen's life and Hizmet Movement participants making the US their new home is as American as The Mayflower. Jon Pahl's book, besides its other merits, powerfully captures that dimension and presents it to the American audience. In that sense A Life of Hizmet addresses one of the most understudied compartments of the literature on Gulen himself and the Hizmet Movement. In a more general outloook, the book is "critically sound and politically inspiring" as its author hoped it to be. One of the main preconditions for a healthy inquiry is ensuring that the tool of analysis matches the nature of the topic at hand. Sadly, a sizeable portion of the early accounts about Gulen failed to satisfy that standard. They rather assumed an oversimplified attitude by narrowing the issue to politics and thus doing a great injustice to social, religious, civic dimensi