'House of Light': thuis en vroomheid in de Gülen-beweging (HoLi)

My research project will investigate the effects of certain forms of interpreting and experiencing Islam on the production of moral subjects and the shaping of individual trajectories and social practices, by focusing on women participation.My research project will investigate how Muslim spaces are created in diasporic Muslim contexts from an anthropological perspective. It will analyse the role that religious practices and discourses play in home-making processes and in the production of different levels of belonging among religiously committed Muslim women. Through the analysis of the complex ways in which the shaping of an ideal Muslim self intermingles with actualizations of home outside homeland, I will untangle the mechanisms through which space is made home in diverse diasporic contexts and further anthropological understandings of how religiously framed practices can shape subjects capable of living throughout the globalized world. I will, particularly, consider the ways in which women negotiate and respond to moral constraints in the different arenas that constitute their everyday practices, both inside and outside their community, and how and to which extent those moral constraints affect their individual autonomy. In order to do that, I will conduct ethnographic fieldwork through participant observation with women members of the Gülen Movement in Belgium, whose participants are Turkish followers of the charismatic religious leader Fethullah Gülen.
The proposed project builds upon, expands and further develops my doctoral research on the construction of moral subjects among women of the Gülen Movement in Brazil, which demonstrates that the performance of Islamic practices as they are understood by Gülen’s followers, produces a conditioned agency among women. The research project will broaden my ethnographic universe and allow me to take a comparative approach to better understand the Gülen Movement as a whole and the specificities to its localized communities.