Author Archives: Fred Yi

India Microlending

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DE SAM LAZARO: Microlending began in the nonprofit world as a means to help poor people start enterprises that would make them self-sufficient.

VIJAY MAHAJAN (Founder, BASIX): We were from the world of development, and we spent a frustrating number of years trying to get small amounts of credit for poor people. Then there’s a limit to how much you can do as a nonprofit, and then eventually we restructured as for-profit.

DE SAM LAZARO: In less than decade, microlending grew into a seven billion dollar industry. One company, SKS Microfinance, raised $350 million in an initial public stock offering. Salesmen from various new companies fanned out into rural areas like this village in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, offering money to people, no questions asked.

post01-microlendingVILLAGE WOMAN: They came to us continuously for 10 days, and they offered loans. They said we will give you loans and you can pay them back in easy installments. It’s not a hard thing.

DE SAM LAZARO: No sooner had one company’s agents left than another’s would arrive. The goal, critics of these companies say, was to increase the volume of loans so as to attract or impress the big investors, even though many borrowers earned barely two dollars a day as agriculture laborers. Almost all of these women say they were coaxed into several high-interest loans ranging from $500 to $1000.

MARIA POLEPAKKA: I have loans from three different companies, about $700 in all. I use the money from one to pay off the others, and I’ll continue to do that until I can’t any more, and then I’ll stop making the payments.

DE SAM LAZARO: That won’t be easy, say others who’ve fallen behind. Pula Polepakka, a mother of two small children, says even though she and her husband had four loans they stayed current for three years. But they missed three weekly installments after her husband, a house painter, took ill. “The collection boys,” as she calls them, began to hound them.

post02-microlendingPULA POLEPAKKA: We left for another village where we have relatives, but the collection boys tracked us down in that village, and we were humiliated. He didn’t say anything about committing suicide. He just went far away and took his life.

DE SAM LAZARO: Her husband’s suicide late in 2009, and those of several dozen other borrowers, gained the attention of media, politicians, and government regulators like Subramanyam Reddy.

SUBRAMANYAM REDDY: Some day it had to burst. The bubble had to burst.

DE SAM LAZARO: Last October, an ordinance written by Reddy was approved by the state’s legislature. It mandated credit checks, monthly instead of weekly installments, and it outlawed unfair collection practices that Reddy says also jack up administrative costs and interest rates to usurious levels. He says those rates are never fully disclosed to unsuspecting, often barely literate clients.

REDDY: If you really calculate, it comes to about 35 percent, about—the percentage of interest. So there has to be a lot of disclosure, that’s the first fundamental thing. They employ a number of unlawful elements to do their recovery.

post03-microlendingDE SAM LAZARO: Intimidation?

REDDY: Intimidation.

Television news broadcaster: As the ordinance from the government would propose….

DE SAM LAZARO: Meanwhile, opposition political leaders upped the ante. They urged borrowers to stop making payments on their loans altogether. Repayment rates previously above 90 percent plunged, as did the stock of SKS Finance, and banks stopped lending to microfinance institutions. The industry’s Vijay Mahajan says these developments have paralyzed business and imperiled a critical source of credit for the poor.

MAHAJAN: Instead of going after a few incidents where, you know, extreme overlending had been done, or going after one or two institutions which had systematically engaged in such practices, the entire sector was converted into a demon.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mahajan defends several practices singled out for criticism, like weekly collections. Laborers get paid weekly, he says. As for interest rates, he says microlenders themselves borrow from banks at 12 to 13 percent interest and incur high costs going door to door to collect payments. However, critics say these commercial microloan companies cared more about the profit of their investors than the welfare of their clients. Ela Bhatt, who runs the much smaller nonprofit Sewa Bank, says people at the very margins of the economy need much more than credit, because many of their most basic needs are not met.

post04-microlendingELA BHATT (Sewa Bank): There are so many gaps, so many leaks in the life of the poor, and for them livelihood is very essential. Unless we have something really concrete to improve the livelihood conditions so that they have more income, all these have to be done. Otherwise, only microcredit is just flimsy.

DE SAM LAZARO: In other words, she says loans should be used to finance productive activities that generate new income. In Andhra Pradesh the government says two-thirds of the loans were used for everyday households needs. Bhatt and many development experts say commercialization has distorted the central mission of microlending. But Basix’s Mahajan says there’s simply not enough money in the nonprofit or charity world.

MAHAJAN: The capital investment that’s required to meet all the, you know, unmet needs of poor people in this country and the world, for all kinds of things—it runs into trillions of dollars and you need, therefore, mainstream capital to actually underpin any attempts at addressing this in a business-like way.

post05-microlendingDE SAM LAZARO: Mahajan agrees microlenders will have to return to lending strictly for income-generating activities. For now, banks have slowly resumed lending to the companies, and both he and regulator Subramanyam Reddy say it’s critical that borrowers now resume paying back their loans, though Reddy says they’ll have to be rescheduled with lower payments and longer payback periods.

(speaking to Mahajan Reddy): So you would like for people in distress to have loan modification, not loan forgiveness, basically?

REDDY: Absolutely, absolutely. Clearly many of these loans are unsustainable, but yes, I mean no loan forgiveness.

DE SAM LAZARO: There’s broad consensus that microfinance can be an effective tool to bring hundreds of millions of poor people into the global economy as participants in one of the world’s fastest growing economy. But the more immediate task is to clean up the microfinance industry that’s been spawned in India, one that right now looks very much like the American subprime mess.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Hyderabad, India.

Assessing the State of the Union Address

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How are people of faith reacting to President Barack Obama’s January 25, 2011 State of the Union address? Watch as Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton talks with a panel of religion analysts, including Kenyatta Gilbert, assistant professor of homiletics at the Howard University School of Divinity and an ordained Baptist minister; Shaun Casey, professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary and former advisor to the Obama presidential campaign; and Mark Rodgers, principal of The Clapham Group and former Republican leadership staffer in the US Senate. They met at Wesley Seminary at Mount Vernon Square in Washington, DC.

 

Erica Brown: Calculations of the Spirit

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President Obama is to be commended for insisting on greater “civilogue” in this country in his State of the Union address. He was clearly trying to reach across the aisle, and even the seating was more bipartisan. The spiritual value of seeing God in the other cannot be stressed enough in politics today. Our leaders have failed to be role models in this regard and are often the worst culprits when it comes to belittling the value of alternative opinions, even those held with deep conviction.

As much as the president sought to address the economic ills of the country, he did not, however, explore the spiritual and emotional anguish of those who are unemployed whose very sense of self-worth becomes a question mark in the absence of a job. The leadership of this country cannot focus exclusively on the financial bottom line when the jobless feel themselves to be faceless as well. They drop from our ranks and then drop from our universe of concerns. As we try to fix a broken world, we cannot only do the math. We also have to do calculations of the spirit and redeem the worth of those who struggle to find inner strength.

Dr. Erica Brown is a writer, educator, and scholar-in-residence for the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.

Andrew Finstuen: The State of the Future

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Religion surfaced in three ways in President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union address.

First, like all presidents he offered expressions of civil religion with references to America as a “light to the world” and as a “moral example” to those “who yearn for freedom, justice, and dignity.” Second, he provided brief but important comments about religious pluralism in the United States, stressing that “American Muslims are a part of our American family” and that our troops are “Christian and Hindu, Jewish and Muslim.” Third, and most central to the speech, he made promises about the future.

American Christians hold fast to promises about the future as well—though some of them caution against specific prescriptions about what that future holds while others provide exacting detail about it. William Miller, a mid-nineteenth-century religious leader and founder of the Millerites, was of the latter persuasion. He predicted the date of Jesus Christ’s return not once, but three times.

Obama is no William Miller—far from it—but his address outlined an ambitious plan for “winning the future.” But, as Obama knows and as we know, the future is unknowable. The empty seat in the House chamber that should have been filled by Gabrielle Giffords was a stark reminder of that fact. Just days ago in Tucson, Obama carefully and eloquently acknowledged the uncertainty of the future: “Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, ‘When I looked for light, then came darkness.’”

The sad and unpredictable reality of Tucson is but the latest reminder among a host of unfortunate reminders about the inscrutability of the future. As a new president, Obama inherited two of the longest wars in American history and an economic crisis of staggering proportions, neither of which anyone saw coming in their full magnitude. Yet their coming was due to an American swagger that presumed to win the future in the Middle East and to insure future prosperity with reckless financial instruments. Such hubris about the future is precisely why America is behind—behind, as the president made clear, in innovation, education, and infrastructure. The problem of paying for guns and butter and bailouts forced Obama, for all of his faith in the American character and the American dream, to deliver a “malaise” speech of his own, marking all of America’s second-, third-, and even ninth-place finishes in the race for global influence.

Obama’s sense of America’s lag on these fronts, but also his sense of optimism about winning the future, was most acute and evocative when he declared that “this is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” America’s innovation gap of a half-century ago spawned unparalleled achievement—the first man on the moon—and technological advance orchestrated by the creation of NASA. The future of NASA, however, hangs in the balance. Obama, among others, has questioned the cost-effectiveness of this organization.

Yet it is entirely predictable that presidents will make promises at the State of the Union. Few citizens—including this one—would want it to be otherwise. Obama’s plans for American innovation, education, and infrastructure are crucial to the nation’s ability to meet the demands of the present and to prepare for competition with emergent world leaders such as China and India. The question is whether ”winning the future” assumes that America can manage history as it unfolds, a pretentious and dangerous position for any nation to believe in as a matter of religious or political destiny or both.

Andrew Finstuen is director of the Honors College and associate professor of history at Boise State University. His recent book, “Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), received the American Society of Church History’s Brewer Prize.

Robert H. Nelson: Sin, Sacrifice, and the State of the Union

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Mainstream Protestantism has declined sharply in recent decades in the United States but the big speeches of our political leaders still routinely echo the Protestant history of the nation. The message is one of sin and redemption. We have committed many grave wrongs but the time has now come to repent and reform. We must renew our dedication to live up to the high expectations God holds out for us. As Americans, we are called to a higher standard because this nation is, as the Puritans said, a “city upon a hill” to shine a beacon to all mankind. This idea of a model for the world was secularized after the American Revolution to become a national model of progress, liberty, and democracy. Each new president is required to repeat this message on suitable occasions, if in ways suited to the specific economic and other circumstances of that president.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama offered the latest updating of the American national faith. We are a nation uniquely created, he said, on “common hopes and a common creed.” This mission is what “sets us apart as a nation.” We are a place where “every race and faith and point of view can be found,” binding us together as “one people”—a message of particular poignancy coming from the first black president of the United States. America must be “not just a place on a map, but the light to the world.” John Winthrop could not have said it better.

Owing to many large failings of our government and business leaders, who put indifference or greed above the national interest, we have recently suffered the worst economic downturn since the great depression. We have sinned again. But today, the president said, we are renouncing our wayward ways; instead, “we are poised for progress.” If we can address the many “challenges that have been decades in the making,” the products of our many past failures as a nation, our future success is assured.

But it will not be easy. We must be committed to remaking ourselves. As President Obama said, “Sustaining the American dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age.” God offers no guarantees.

Now we are challenged by China and India. Once it was the challenge of the former Soviet Union. “The Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik,” the president recalled. But this failure simply spurred us to greater heights as a nation, within a decade going to the moon, all part of a new “wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of jobs.” If we simply show the appropriate resolve again, “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” But we must have faith in ourselves.

One of our greatest sins has been the corruption of our national politics by private interests and the forces of greed more broadly. We have lost all fiscal discipline. Deficits have ballooned, “the legacy,” the president said, of out-of-control “deficit spending that began almost a decade ago.” Again, a new national spirit of sacrifice will be required. The president proposed to freeze domestic spending for five years, which “will require painful cuts” for many Americans. We have also sinned against the environment in the recent past. Here again, large sacrifices will be required. “By 2035, 80 percent of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources.” But here as well, America can reform its ways. We can meet the challenge: “We’re telling America’s scientist and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo projects of our time.”

Tthere are many other such passages in the full body of the State of the Union address. The same messages have been heard over and over again in American political life ever since the Puritans settled in Massachusetts 350 years ago. The specific context of today is, of course, new. There are new examples, new policy questions, and new implementation proposals, but we are hearing again the basic story of America: We have sinned, we will be called to account, we must reform our ways, but God will bless us if we now heed his commands. We are the chosen people.

Unlike some of our previous presidents, President Obama barely mentioned God by name in his State of the Union speech (only once in the closing obligatory line, “God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America”). But his speech was Christian and specifically Protestant through and through. That is the way it is with religion in America in the twenty-first century. In our secular age, our thinking is no less religious, but the most important forms of religion are now implicit and at least partially disguised.

Robert H. Nelson is a professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author, most recently, of “The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America” (Penn State Press, 2010).

Reynolds Price, 1933-2011

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Celebrated American writer Reynolds Price died on January 20, 2011. He was 77, and he often wove his Christian faith into his writings. He also published two biblical translations. All the great religious creeds, he said, “have known forever that if we’re ever to arrive at the state of anything called wisdom, pain seems to be the way we get there.” Watch excerpts about illness, suffering, and survival from our 1998 interview with him.

 

Gun Control

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: This past week in Congress, Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy of New York introduced a bill that would ban the sale of all gun magazines that can hold more than 10 bullets. The clip used in the Tucson shootings held 30. But as the popularity of gun shows suggests, any attempt to tighten gun laws faces strong opposition. Republicans control the House of Representatives, and no Republican supports the McCarthy bill. One man who understands the politics of gun legislation is Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence. He’s a Republican and was three times elected mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Welcome to you.

PAUL HELMKE (President, Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence): Thanks, Bob.

ABERNETHY: So what are the realities on this? A bill has gone into the House. Another one’s going into the Senate next week. But realistically does either one of them have any chance?

HELMKE: I believe they do. I think this time it could be a different response.

ABERNETHY: Why?

post01-guncontrolHELMKE: For a number of reasons. It was a member of Congress that was attacked. That’s one. Secondly, the bill that we’re talking about relates directly to the Tucson shooting. The individual was stopped, not because the police responded or someone else with a gun responded. He was stopped because the clip ran out of bullets. If he had run out of bullets after 10 instead of 30, less people are injured. And the other thing is this showed how weak the laws on the books are. No law was broken. Even with his dangerousness to his fellow students, no law was broken until he pulled the trigger the first time. So I think this time they might treat this not as a Second Amendment wedge issue. They might treat this as a public safety issue, and just as they banned cop-killer bullets and plastic guns that don’t show up in metal detectors, maybe they’ll say these high-capacity clips should also be banned.

ABERNETHY: But isn’t it the case that the overwhelming majority of the American people, who the people in Congress are supposed to represent, feel that any restriction on gun ownership is wrong?

HELMKE: And that’s not true. Actually, the one poll that sometimes is used to say support for gun control is dropping say that now only 46 or 50 percent support stronger measures as opposed to 75 percent 15, 20 years ago. But that’s still showing that a number of people support in general gun control, and when you ask about specific measures, even licensing people to have guns like we license drivers—66 percent support. Background checks on all sales, restrictions on semi-automatic weapons, those things have strong support when you ask the individual questions.

post02-guncontrolABERNETHY: When you ask the individual. And how about the McCarthy bill?

HELMKE: McCarthy bill, we’ve polled it three different times. Fifty-eight percent support it. Fifty percent of the American people strongly support it. It’s hard to find that kind of intensity for any kind of question.

ABERNETHY: This past week there was the announcement of a coalition of something like 24 religious groups to support some kind of gun …

HELMKE: Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violence was announced this last week on Martin Luther King Day. The next day they were part of the news conference supporting Carolyn McCarthy’s bill. And I think this is important. This is part of what’s going to change the dynamic. We need leadership from the top, from the president speaking on this. But more importantly we need our people in the communities telling their elected officials do something about gun violence, and the faith community plays such an important role in raising the moral issue, raising that issue with their congregations, and getting people to speak up.

ABERNETHY: After the Tucson shootings there was some comment about gun control from some people in the religious community, but there was an awful lot of silence, too. Did that disappoint you?

post03-guncontrolHELMKE: Silence from anybody is disappointing, and I think you know with some people it’s always wait until folks are out of the hospital, wait until the funerals are over. But I keep telling people this is an issue I talk about every day. I say the same thing every day, and we need more people saying the same thing. To allow 30,000 people to be killed by guns every year in this country, another 70,000 to be injured by guns every year in this country, to have this almost worship of guns that occurs and the violence that flows from that is something we shouldn’t be tolerating in our society.

ABERNETHY: But for you personally, is this a religious issue?

HELMKE: It does fit into my religious tradition. I went to a Lutheran grade school growing up. We talked about nonviolence. The story of the garden of Gethsemane is put down that sword, you know, is what Jesus is telling the disciple. That’s the lesson we need to learn, and it really gets into how do we relate to our fellowman? Do we live in a state of fear of everyone we’re dealing with, or do we feel that we’re a community of faith and that you respect the other, that you deal with the other, or do we bring a gun to every confrontation?

ABERNETHY: But isn’t it the case that there are a lot of religious people who very much like guns, too?

HELMKE: And I’m not anti-gun. I’m not against the gun. But what the gun does to so many people, making that gun so easily available to dangerous people, like the Tucson shooter, irresponsible people. You know, we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. We need to restrict the easy access to this. Again, even Carolyn McCarthy’s bill isn’t talking about the gun. It’s talking about the high-capacity ammunition that’s not used to hunt, not used for personal protection, only used to kill a lot of people quickly.

ABERNETHY: Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence. Many thanks.

The Gülen Movement

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LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: His name is Fethullah Gülen. He is a 69-year-old Turkish Islamic scholar and author, apparently in poor health, who came to the US seeking medical treatment. He lives a secluded life at a retreat in Pennsylvania. So why was he voted by his admirers in a survey by Foreign Policy magazine as the most significant intellectual in the world? Among those admirers are Kemal Oksuz and Alp Aslandogan.

KEMAL OKSUZ (President, Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians): Kind, modest, humble, generous. We see him as a source of information, inspiration, but never prophet. He would be the one who would be troubled the most if he hears that followers or inspirers see him kind of prophet.

ALP ASLANDOGAN (Institute for Interfaith Dialogue): Personally, he is definitely very knowledgeable, very sincere in wanting the best for the people—not just Turkey, but for all humanity.

SEVERSON: Gülen has inspired his followers to build schools, provide humanitarian aid and engage in interfaith dialogue. University of Houston Professor Helen Ebaugh, who wrote a book on the Gülen movement says the movement got its start when Gülen was an imam in Turkey.

post01-gulenPROFESSOR HELEN EBAUGH (Dept. of Sociology, University of Houston; Author of “The Gülen Movement”): When Fethullah Gülen began preaching in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in Turkey, his message was we don’t need more madrassas. We need schools that would promote science and math and secular subjects, and his contention was that one can be modern and one can be scientific and still be a good Muslim.

SEVERSON: Bill Martin is a senior fellow in religion and public policy at the James Baker Institute at Rice University. He says the Gülen movement is different from fundamentalist Islam because they respect all faiths and believe religion is compatible with science.

WILLIAM MARTIN (Senior Fellow, James Baker Institute at Rice University): I think it’s fair to say that Islam has had difficulty in coming to terms with modernity, and in that I think that the Gülen movement offers a much more positive picture of what Islam can be.

SEVERSON: Gülen-inspired volunteers from Turkey bring Turkish language and culture with them. In Houston they sponsor a Turkish Olympiad where American students compete in Turkish dance and song. The winners compete in an annual competition in Ankara, Turkey. There are more than a 1000 Gülen-inspired schools and universities in over 100 countries.

MARTIN: Gülen has always emphasized education, and that really lies at the core of this movement. To be a good Muslim meant to be well educated, and to be a good Muslim who participated in modernity meant to be conversant and well educated in science, math, and technology.

post02-gulenOKSUZ: Education helps you overcome ignorance, poverty, corruption, hate, extremism, racism, whatever, all the illnesses of the society. Because of that education is very important.

SEVERSON: In Texas there are 33 nationally recognized public charter schools with over 16,000 students grades K through 12. They’re called Harmony schools, and the Turkish superintendent insists they are strictly secular and in no way connected to Gülen. Professor Ebaugh says there’s a reason for this kind of sensitivity.

EBAUGH: I think a lot of that is related to the Islamophobia that exists in this country. I think there is a lot of fear that Islam is trying to take hold of this country and countries around the world—that it’s trying to spread itself.

SEVERSON: About 60 percent of the kids in the Texas Harmony schools come from disadvantaged neighborhoods. The schools say they have a 100 percent graduation rate. No wonder there are 21,000 kids on the waiting list.

MARTIN: I think the Harmony schools are an outstanding example of what the Gülen followers have been able to accomplish in particular with respect to education. Of the three high schools that had graduating seniors this year, only three students had not already been admitted to a four-year college at the time of graduation.

PHOEBE TAYLOR (Teacher, Harmony School of Innovation): I know teachers who stay up here seven o’clock at night, eight o’clock at night who are also working at night from home.

post03-gulenCHUCK LAMBERT (Teacher, Harmony School of Innovation): They know our expectations for them. Through kindergarten all the way through high school, they know this is a college school. Our goal is to get you into college.

SHARON QUINILTY (Teacher, Harmony School of Innovation): I have never worked harder. But you really see the results. Because the parents are very involved, the kids really respond.

OKSUZ: Gülen—not only he urges teachers to go and work at these schools, on the other hand he urges people from all walks of life to go and support all these schools. Build up schools instead of mosques. Build up universities instead of mosques. Build up cultural centers, interfaith organizations, aid organizations, hospitals instead of mosques.

SEVERSON: Supporters say Gülen owns nothing himself but has persuaded others to give generously to many independent organizations.

EBAUGH: The movement has become quite wealthy. It’s one of the richest movements in Turkey. It has private hospitals, it has all these private schools. There’s a big media industry, one of the biggest in Turkey. It has the Zaman newspaper. Kimse Yok Mu is one of the latest. That’s their relief organization. They help disaster victims all over the world.

post04-gulenSEVERSON: Kimse Yok Mu and in the US Helping Hands contribute millions of dollars in humanitarian aid each year. Professor Ebaugh says in Turkey Gülen urged businessmen to grow their businesses and give a part of their earnings, as much as a third, to support humanitarian aid and education.

EBAUGH: The movement is financed not only by these wealthy businessmen, but more importantly it’s financed by everybody in the movement. Everybody contributes, and the average seems to be about 10 percent.

ASLANDOWAN: I go beyond the expected level in my income level. For all of this my motivation is that just like God loves us as human beings we also should act in a manner that is pleasing to God. And I believe that all of these actions—charitable donations, volunteerism—are pleasing to God. That’s why I’m doing all of this.

SEVERSON: Alp is a volunteer in charge of the Institute for Interfaith Dialog in Houston, which is located in the Raindrop Turkish House. This is a mockup of the projected interfaith center, which will include a Jewish synagogue, a mosque, and a Christian church. Gülen has always stressed the importance of interfaith dialogue to promote peace and has met with Pope John Paul II and reached out to leaders of many religious minorities. And he may have been the first Muslim leader to condemn the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

ASLANDOWAN: He immediately posted an ad clearly saying that this was an anti, a non-Islamic act. It’s not even a human act. The people who committed this are not Muslims; they can not even be called humans. He said Bin Laden is a monster and people around him are monster if they think like him.

post05-gulenSEVERSON: Alp Aslandowan says Gülen teaches that suicide attacks cannot be justified in Islam.

ASLANDOWAN: Some people try to justify the killings, homicidal killings, by saying that those people who are engaged in those, they don’t have any other means, and he said that this is not a Muslim’s view. It cannot be a Muslim’s thinking, because for a Muslim if the end result, if the end goal is virtuous, worthwhile, holy, then the means should also be holy.

SEVERSON: Professor Ebaugh says the movement could do better by placing women in leadership roles. Gülen is not without his critics.

EBAUGH: The big issue in Turkey for the critics is the fear that the movement is becoming very powerful, very wealthy, and that there is a sub rosa agenda to create an Islamic state, and they always compare it to Khomeini and Iran.

MARTIN: I think there’s no warrant to the charges that Gülen wants to take over and impose Sharia law. I think that, frankly, is an absurd fear.

OKSUZ: The movement is neither sect nor cult. It is a civil society movement.

MARTIN: Sometimes they are accused of being a missionary, a missionizing entity. As far as I know, I don’t know anyone through the schools or otherwise that they’ve tried to turn into a Muslim.

SEVERSON: For the time being, those who follow Gülen, both critics and admirers, seem to agree that he is leading one of the most important movements in Islam.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Houston.