We were in the living room cleaning up the carpet when I asked Fatme why she and her flatmates kept their heads covered inside the house. ‘This house is not ours, abla [older sister], it's a Hizmet house’, she replied.1 And she continued: ‘Here in the living room, on this carpet, we make our prayers.’ Fatme and another five young Turkish women lived in a university student house in Brazil, a country to which they made hicret (migration) to do hizmet (service), that is, fulfil their divine mission as participants of the Hizmet Movement.2
In this research context, the Turkish word hizmet may be translated as ‘religious service’ and is used by my interlocutors to refer to the translocal Turkish Islamic movement in which they are participants as an imagined global community, also known as the Gülen Movement in a reference to its religious leader, Fethullah Gülen. Hizmet is also the term that movement participants use to refer to the set of practices they perform as a means to shape their selves in accordance with shared conceptions about the ‘ideal human being’ (ideal insanı) (Gülen 2006: 81). According to them, the ‘ideal human being’ strives for the moral perfection of the self as a way to please God and receive His blessings, foreseeing a place in Paradise.
Moral perfection has an individual and a collective dimension. Its individual dimension relates to self-cultivation and involves the acquisition of scientific and religious education, including the observance of Islamic norms and performance of Islamic practices. The collective dimension of becoming an ‘ideal human being’ consists of intervening in society to morally transform it. This ‘civilisational’ mission involves promoting the movement and spreading its message across the globe through a diverse range of activities, which requires mobility and community-building in host societies. In the case of young single women who have made hicret to do hizmet abroad, self-cultivation also means ‘growing up’, while contributing to the movement's collective project comprehends forming a new ‘Hizmet family’ and making a home outside the homeland.
According to Gülen's concept of hizmet, the ‘ideal human being’ constantly seeks perfection through the embodiment of certain Islamic principles, such as self-awareness, self-reflexivity and self-accountability (muhasebe), purity and sincerity of intentions placed in every action to please God (ihlas), and self-sacrifice (fidakarlık). The ‘ideal human being’ is well informed about the reasons behind every religious belief and act, and practises Islam consciously. This emphasis on the religious consciousness of the educated Muslim is a reflection of the ‘objectification of Islam’, a process that has shaped reform-oriented interpretations of how committed Muslims should engage with their religion since the nineteenth century (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004). The ‘ideal human being’ must enact her embodied dispositions through deeds and acts (Gülen 1994: 24; 2006: 81–105). The embodiment and enactment of these dispositions demand a high level of commitment and discipline.
An act that has become crucial to the development of the ‘ideal human being’ is hicret, an Islamic ‘doctrine’ (Masud 1990) or notion that was already mobilised by Gülen in the 1990s as an initiative of those who were ready to follow Muhammad's footsteps. At that time, Gülen defined hicret in terms of Turkish religious nationalism (Aktay 2003): Making hicret meant renouncing life in Turkey in order to reintroduce Islam into societies that had historical, ethnic or cultural connections with Turkey, such as Turkic Central Asian countries, the Caucasus and the Balkans. It also meant developing his network of followers and propagating a Turkish consciousness (Balcı 2003) or a Turkic-Muslim identity (Turam 2004) in those regions of the world. For young female followers, hicret can mean many things and combines the search for knowledge (as exhorted by Muhammad, according to a Hadis), representation of Islam (temsil) in non-Muslim-majority contexts and participation in the globalised world through morally secure arenas.3
Gülen's ideas fit within the broader context of religious reform that emerged in Muslim-majority countries throughout the twentieth century and intensified in the 1990s. His project of creating new generations of educated Muslims has a modern pedagogic framework (Vicini 2013) that draws from Said Nursi's holistic idea of education (Tittensor 2014).4 Like other Sufi-inspired religious leaders, Gülen also draws on Sufi notions of inner growth to formulate a normative conciliation between individual achievement – through professional and economic success – and the constitution of an ideal Muslim self. In this context, ‘education’ is stretched to include various forms of disciplinary discourse and practice, which are reproduced in institutionalised pedagogical settings and informal spaces of learning and socialisation. Some of these diverse environments are the Hizmet-linked media sector, cultural centres, dialogue platforms, schools, preparatory courses, study circles (sohbets), dormitories and university student houses (Hendrick 2013; Tittensor 2014; Vicini 2020). The latter is the ethnographic space explored in this article.
Hizmet formal educational spaces have been the object of numerous scholarly studies (Agai 2007; Balcı 2003; Özdalga 2003; Dohrn 2013; Tee 2016), while more informal and private spaces of religious learning and socialisation have received less attention in the literature. This production mostly concentrates on sohbet (weekly meetings that combine Islamic studies and sociability), and only a few studies address women's gatherings. Apart from one or two ethnographies (Ulu-Sametoğlu 2022), research on women's sohbet has been mainly with married women, whether housewives (Jassal 2013) or professionals (Curtis 2012; Hartmann 2018; Kayıkcı 2020). Other informal and private spaces of religious learning and socialisation, namely dormitories and student houses, have been the focus of even fewer ethnographies (Vicini 2013, 2020), mainly due to limited access to participants’ private lives and their community's domestic spaces. This article adds to the academic debate on the Hizmet Movement by focusing on the everyday practices of young single women who live in a university student house in a context of hicret, therefore tackling experiences that are specific to this group.
By taking an ethnographic approach to homemaking and the cultivation of an ethical self in a context of migration, I aim to contribute to a better understanding of the effects of hizmet's normative and practical framework on young women's subjectivity and individual trajectories. I will provide an ethnographic account of the everyday life of six young women, between 17 and 24 years old, who left their homes and families in Turkey to attend a university course in Brazil as a way of making hicret, that is, engaging in an Islamically framed migration. Once under the management of the Hizmet community in Brazil, these students perform a diverse set of Islamic and ‘Islamised’ practices as a means to shape an ideal Muslim self and (re)produce the Hizmet Movement as a world view, a religious community (cemaat) and a moral space.5
This article analyses the performance of what I call hizmet's ‘disciplinary programme’ and homemaking practices, and demonstrates how the domestic space functions as a moral terrain where young women become ablas, or wives and mothers in the larger ‘Hizmet family’. It also shows that by becoming an abla, young female followers of Gülen in Brazil become inhabitants of the Hizmet Movement as a translocal home, an imagined, ideal yet structured space where they actualise their moral potential.
Homemaking and Religious Practices in the Hicret
Home is a multidimensional concept and may evoke a diverse range of meanings, such as privacy, roots and even paradise (Somerville 1992). As it is also intertwined with gender, class, ethnicity, family, community or nation, it may be described as a set of relationships (Mallet 2004) and defined as a ‘socio-spatial system’ that both enables and constrains forms of relationship and action (Saunders and Williams 1988: 82). As a set of relationships, ‘home’, like ‘family’, may be seen as the ‘primary unit of ritual observance’, religious education and transmission of religious knowledge from one generation to the next (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004: 83). Ideally, it acts as the microcosm of the moral order and guarantees its reproduction and perpetuation. In any case, ‘home plays an inescapable role in defining who we are’ (Samanani and Lenhard 2019: 1).
In a context of migration, home is sometimes an abstract idea that stands between a nostalgic past and a utopian future (Al-Ali and Koser 2002), but, although it is not reducible to a physical, built structure, ‘space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control’ (Douglas 1991: 289). For members of the same diasporic community who share a cultural identity, representations of home and representations of the group may conflate (Al-Ali and Koser 2002).
As an individual practice, home has also been understood as a tentative achievement in the daily efforts of emplacing emotions and meanings through practice (Cieraad 1999). In this perspective, home is what people do to ‘feel at home’ (Jackson 1995). Home, thus, may be conceptualised as a subjunctive space that is a product of individual everyday practices and experiences. The home is, therefore, intimately linked to the self, for both are grounds for experiencing the world through their bounding yet porous physical aspect, namely the house and the body. The conceptualisation of home as an extension of the self (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995) is particularly useful for understanding the role of the home, both as a built structure and a set of feelings (Blunt and Dowling 2006), in the shaping of an ethical self in a context of migration – and the other way around, for understanding the role of practices of self-cultivation in the production of meanings and affects in the domestic space. As rightly put by Janet Carsten (2003: 55), ‘houses are material shelters as well as ritual centres’.
The fact that the house and the body share a ‘common anatomy and a common life history’ (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 3), especially through their structured, material form, is demonstrated by Pierre Bourdieu (2000) in his maison cabile and, later, would substantiate his development of Marcel Mauss's (1995) concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1997). The embodiment of a particular set ‘of durable, transposable dispositions’ in the creation of forms of habitus occurs in the dialectical interaction between body and house (ibid.: 72). However, Bourdieu's model limits the embodiment of a system of dispositions to the distribution of social and economic capital, leaving little or no space for the effects of other influences, such as religious systems, on forms of being and acting in the world.
The relationship between body, habitus and religious practices was elaborated by Thomas Csordas (1990: 5) in his ‘paradigm of embodiment’, which defines the body as the ‘existential ground of culture’. Csordas's (ibid.: 29) emphasis on the body as the subject of culture and the locus of religious experience highlights the central role of reflexivity and effort in ‘the embodiment in ritual practice of’ a specific habitus. The role of religious systems in the shaping of the self is also analysed by Talal Asad (1993: 125–134), for whom the formation and transformation of moral dispositions depend on ‘a particular program of disciplinary practices’, designed to create and reorganise sensitivities and desires. Unlike Bourdieu (1997), for whom the embodiment of dispositions occurs largely through unconscious processes, Saba Mahmood (2005: 15) emphasises the intentional nature of self-cultivation and points to the need for an analysis of the specific form and character of the practices of the self in order to better understand ‘the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms’.
At this point, I would like to call attention to the collective dimension of home and homemaking in the Hizmet community in Brazil. Drawing on the idea of home as a space brought under control and ‘structured functionally, economically, aesthetically and morally’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998: 6; Douglas 1991), this article shows that, in the Hizmet community in Brazil, homemaking, communitarian practices and self-cultivation are intrinsically connected, producing affective and moral dispositions that link the self to the broader Hizmet Movement as a translocal moral space. While home is an ideal that can potentially be actualised through practices of hizmet anywhere in the hicret, the self is conditioned to ‘feel at home’ in spaces that are appropriated and structured according to hizmet's moral framework. This condition was communicated by my interlocutors throughout my fieldwork and may be illustrated by Berna's answer when I asked her whether she planned to stay in Brazil after her marriage. Berna, 23, was engaged to Salih, 30, also a member of the Hizmet community in Brazil: ‘I don't know, abla, we can go anywhere after we get married … as long as it is a place with Hizmet [community], of course.’
This article draws, mainly, on data collected through participant observation while I was a guest at one female student house in Brazil for several periods ranging from three to 15 days between March 2015 and December 2017, including a two-week holiday trip with them to their families’ houses in Turkey in 2016, in the framework of my PhD research.6 After that, I continued to visit the community and attend their events until the outbreak of COVID-19. In-depth fieldwork gave me an opportunity to observe these young women's multiple and varied daily practices while witnessing their ‘coming of age’. As I had known some of them since 2013, I literally saw them growing into womanhood or, to use emic categories, going from being a kız (‘girl’) to being an abla (‘older sister’). Before guiding the reader across the borders to a female student house in Brazil, it is important to trace the overall domesticities that organise social dynamics in that translocal community.7
The (Trans)Local Context
Emerging in the late 1960s in Turkey and already spread all across the globe by the year 2000, the Hizmet Movement established a community in Brazil in 2004. I first came into contact with the movement in 2012, when its participants and related institutions enjoyed a privileged situation both inside and outside Turkey. I witnessed its loss of social prestige, political influence and economic power in the aftermath of the failed July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, for which its religious leader was held responsible by the Turkish government. The following anti-Gülen measures and persecution of his followers engendered critical changes in the movement and in the lives of its participants all over the world (Watmough and Öztürk 2018), although to different degrees and levels depending on the country and community. When voluntary migrants could not go back home and those doing hizmet at home were forced to flee, hicret was rearticulated as a notion and discursive repertoire to index their experiences of exile and reaffirm the movement's missionary endeavours as a resumption of the Prophet Muhammad's divine mission (Dumovich 2019). For young female followers in Brazil, being forced to continue in their hicret, as their homeland became an unsafe place for them, was read as a sign that they were on the righteous path. Like Muhammad in his own hicret in ad 622, religious conviction made them a target of persecution by rulers in their original home.
In Brazil, the Hizmet community organises and structures space and time based on two principles of division: a binary gender opposition (man/woman) and, within each of these categories, an opposition of civil status (single/married). Distinctions based on gender and civil status inform the relations among its members, the division of labour, the access to resources and the degree and forms of ‘control over mind and body’ (Douglas 1991: 303).
A young woman's ‘coming of age’ is indicated by her graduation and confirmed by her marriage, both as a rite of passage and a procedure for the movement's reproducibility. If, as Arnold van Gennep (1981: 130) observes, ‘to get married is to move from one family to another’, in this ethnographic context we could say that to get married is to enter the ‘Hizmet family’, contributing to its reproduction and perpetuation. The ‘girl’ (kız) becomes an abla, that is, forms a new family in the Hizmet Movement and continues her hicret to wherever her husband may be sent by his abi (literally, ‘older brother’, but in this context it means ‘superior’ in the movement's hierarchical structure).
The literal translation of abla is ‘older sister’, but in Turkey the term is also used outside kinship relationships to address older women in a respectful way. In the case of religious communities, abla is a category that also refers to the idea of sisterhood in religion and, therefore, to a certain sense of equality. In the Hizmet Movement, however, when used to address someone in an asymmetrical power relation, due to differences in age, experience or status in the movement, abla indicates deference and subordination, as is the case for the word abi (Vicini 2013; Yavuz 2013).8 Therefore, although hierarchy related to marital status is overcome by marriage, usually right before or right after graduation, other factors such as age, class, education and status in the movement also play a role in determining power relations among women.
Being an abla may also refer to a specific role in the community, such as the ‘abla of the house’. When occupying this position, a single woman is in charge of managing the ‘socio-spatial system’ (Saunders and Williams 1988) of the house in which she and her flatmates live: her management tasks include paying the bills, taking care of provisions, making sure domestic chores are fairly split among inhabitants and motivating the fulfilment of religious duties. The immediately superior position to the ‘abla of the house’ in the community's hierarchical structure is occupied by the ‘abla of the female students’ and, above her, the ‘abla of all women’ in the community in Brazil. In the middle of 2016, the community had between 280 and 300 members, while five years later this number went down to approximately 180.
In order to understand how self, home and group belonging become imbricated in the process of becoming an abla in the Hizmet community in Brazil, I will give an account of the recurrent routine that I saw during my fieldwork with the female undergraduate students in the city of São Paulo. It is the end of 2017 and one of these women, Berna, is getting married. The anthropologist, who lives in another Brazilian state, 500 km away, is a guest at their five-bedroom apartment.
Becoming an Abla
It is 5 o'clock in the morning when the alarm sounds on everybody's smartphones, and Azra, who has been the abla of the house for the past few months, opens the door to the bedrooms and makes sure that all her flatmates have woken up to fulfil their religious duty. Latife and Fatme remain lying down with their eyes closed, so Azra calls them by their names and raises the volume of her own alarm: ‘Namaz!!’ – it is prayer time. Latife stays motionless and in a whispering voice tells Azra she has got her period, while Fatme gets up and jumps into the bathroom disputes that precede morning ablution (abdest). All one can hear at this moment is the sound of slamming doors and pouring water. One by one, the young women go to the still-darkened living room, cover their heads and stand side by side on rugs facing the kible (the direction of the Kaaba). All women positioned, the collective performance of sabah namazı, or dawn prayer, begins.
Prayer
The spatial arrangement of the bodies side by side and in successive ranks reproduces the Islamic principle of horizontality of relations among the faithful during prayer. The ritual performance is silent and is not led by any one of them, that is, no one plays the role of imam (ritual leader). The absence of a ritual leader guiding prayer reinforces the idea of horizontality in relations among these women.
The ritual acts of resting hands crossed at the height of the breasts, keeping the head down, with eyes fixed on the floor, body slightly curved, legs subtly apart, and keeping the ritual sequence, are ‘disciplinary practices’ (Asad 1993: 125) that inscribe in the subjects’ bodies the dispositions of submission to God, modesty and purity, which are constitutive of the ideal Muslim woman according to my interlocutors. These dispositions are embodied (Csordas 1990) through the daily repetition – five times a day – of this ritual practice, ‘a powerful disciplinary instrument of forms of subjectivity and corporality within a frame of references given by the Islamic tradition’, since, along with ablution, they form the loci where the faithful articulate ‘obligation, spontaneity, and intentionality’ (Pinto 2010: 57).
After the ritual prayer, the young women sit relaxed and dispersed on the large rug with bended knees for the recitation of sabah namazı tesbihatı, the tesbihat that follows dawn prayer. Tesbihat is a religious formula, or zikir (from the Arabic dhikr), composed of du'as (supplications), ayas (verses) from the Quran, and evocations of God's names. It is one of the main Sufi rituals and may be composed and practised in various ways, depending on the Sufi path (tarikat) and the mystical affiliation of the master (şeyh) (Trimingham 1971: 204–206). Although the Hizmet Movement is not a Sufi order, Gülen's theology, like Said Nursi's, draws heavily upon the Sufi tradition as it was constructed in Turkey (Hendrick 2013; Vicini 2020).9 In the movement, the tesbihat also takes a particular form: it asks for God's blessings on Said Nursi and Fethullah Gülen.
In the Hizmet community in Brazil, most of the formula is recited aloud by everyone in a group together, which produces the embodiment of certain dispositions that connect the subjects to Islam, the Hizmet Movement and its religious leader. Tesbihat, like zikirs in general, is an inductive ritual, provoking in whoever performs it a subjective religious experience, linking the doctrinal system to embodied dispositions (Pinto 2002).
As part of her role as the abla of the house, Azra asks Fatme to guide the tesbihat, since it has been a while since she did it the last time. Fatme uses a tesbihat application on her smartphone because she does not want to run the risk of changing the order of the verses, since she is aware that her performance will be evaluated by her peers. Nesibe closes her eyes, Leila bows a little; Reyhan and Berna swing their bodies sideways; Azra stands still. When Fatme makes a mistake in the pronunciation of an Arabic letter, Azra corrects her gently, and Fatme repeats the word until she gets it right. While understanding the sacred texts only partially is not a big deal among members of the community, the correct pronunciation of the Arabic words is considered very important, because mispronouncing a word can change its original meaning. However, the ‘authorized version’ (Goody 2012: 129) of the formula is not immune to creations, given the inclusions made by Nursi's followers and, later, by Gülen's. These additions create a ‘new’ authorised version.
The ritual of tesbihat constructs a type of memory analogous to what Harvey Whitehouse (2000: 5–12) calls ‘semantic memory’, which is produced by the routinised repetition of ritual schemes, and characterises the ‘doctrinal’ mode of religiosity. ‘Semantic memory’ creates impersonal and general, although shared, representations of religious systems and, therefore, occurs in communities marked by disciplinary mechanisms that tend to link religious subjectivities to the collective. The ritual of tesbihat as it is performed in the Hizmet community in Brazil brings together the ‘Islamic tradition’ (Asad 1986) and a doctrinal corpus produced by the two religious leaders evoked in the ritual, Said Nursi and Fethullah Gülen. The highly routinised repetition of namaz and tesbihat confers a collective sense to religious experience, which is shared in a more or less generalised way by my interlocutors.
A cognitive disposition is embodied in the process of learning and memorising the religious formula: each one of the young women must memorise the entire tesbihat, which, it must be noted, is in Arabic, a language they do not speak. An affective disposition is embodied through recitation and body movements: the collective recitation makes it more rhythmic and melodic than the individual recitation, like in a chorus, intensifying sensorial experiences and inducing subjective states more effectively. As aptly put by Williamson Fa (2022: 646), vocal recitation, because of its sonic and material qualities, ‘deepen[s] relations and emotional bonds’ with others, ‘both human and more-than-human’. In the Hizmet community in Brazil, the vocal recitation of tesbihat is a way to cultivate relations with God, Muhammad, Nursi and Gülen.
Thus, the ritual form of tesbihat in the Hizmet community in Brazil reveals an emphasis on spiritual growth and self-discipline, but also on the creation of belonging – to the community, the broader movement and the Islamic tradition as it was constituted in Turkey, a Sunni Hanafi Islam – through the production of a ‘semantic memory’ (Whitehouse 2000) and ‘emotional bonds’ (Williamson Fa 2022).
At the end of the religious ritual, Azra shouts a reminder: ‘Arkadaşlar [friends]! Today you should hand me over your çeteles [registers]!’ A cetele is an individual control tool, a list in the form of a table used by all community members. The list consists of practices of the Islamic tradition, such as prayer and fasting, but also of practices that are specific to the Hizmet Movement, such as reading Gülen's books. It is a weekly plan, as it serves as a guide to all religious practices that must be performed for the period of a week. At the same time, it is an inventory of religious practices, as it registers the number of times each one was performed during that week.
The basic model of a çetele in the Hizmet Movement in Brazil is a table with at least seven vertical columns, each corresponding to an individual religious practice: reciting the Quran, reading Nursi's Risale-i Nur, reading Gülen's books, voluntary prayers, fasting and recitation of tesbihat and Cevşen (a prayer that combines suras from the Quran and supplications). But each person is free to add other religious practices to her own list, such as virds (devotional formulas). Some should be performed daily and even many times a day, such as virds (for example, salavats and istiğfars), others only once a week, such as fasting.
Each horizontal row in the table corresponds to a one-week period. In each entry of the matrix (column x row), the number of times a religious practice was performed is registered. In the Quran column, for example, the number of pages that were read may be written down. In the case of the dawn prayer (sabah namazı), on the contrary, my interlocutors usually register the number of times they did not perform it in the corresponding week, since waking up at dawn can be a difficult task, especially during the winter. This is the only one of the obligatory prayers that usually appears in their çeteles, because it is the only one that needs control. Since a çetele does not have a fixed number of practices or weeks, the matrix varies according to its owner.
Making a list is not only a way to enumerate but also to classify, for it informs, orders, includes and excludes specific things – ‘and classification is an obvious condition of language and of knowing’ (Goody 2012: 105). A list brings stability to the information, since it is not necessary to make use of long-term memory; it facilitates control by increasing the visibility of categories, names and quantities; and it is a flexible artifice, since it allows adaptations, acquiring alternative forms according to the individual and the situation.
The point of making a çetele is less the fulfilment of all religious duties and more the accountability and control over self-formation, stressing moral autonomy as a central embodied disposition in the cultivation of an ideal Muslim self. For my interlocutors, religious practices must be performed rationally, consciously, reflexively and intentionally, as opposed to what they consider ‘unconscious’ and ‘automatic’ forms of practising religion, which in their view are common to most Muslims (that is, those who do not practise hizmet). This emphasis on religious awareness opposed to ignorance about the meaning and reason behind each practice, norm and belief echoes the ‘objectification of Islam’ (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004) that has been a common trait of reform-oriented religious groups such as the Hizmet Movement, as pointed out by Vicini (2020).
Furthermore, the written and ordered documentation of religious practices establishes a formalisation and, thus, a high degree of ‘objectification’ (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004) of the practices in question. Objectification allows a detailed accountability of the performed actions and, in the case of Gülen's followers, even of performances that they missed. This ‘discipline of the minute’ (Foucault 1995: 140) is justified by the ascetism of their world view, but also by a rationalisation of the normative and practical framework of the Islamic tradition, since they believe that God's creation is a logical chain of minute details.
Every week each one of the young single women delivers her çetele to the abla of the house, who in turn hands them over to the female students’ abla, who passes them on to the abla of all women in the community. After evaluating and discussing the results with the single women's abla, the abla of the women in the community delivers the çeteles to the abi of all men in the community, usually her husband, who manages and controls community members’ religious duties.
Fatme returns to bed; Azra and Beyza grab a sandwich and leave for the university. Dilek and Reyhan, who study in the afternoon, enter the kitchen and carefully prepare a nice breakfast for the anthropologist, who benefits from their almost overstated hospitality. Practices of hospitality are understood by Hizmet participants as a religious duty, as stated in a Hadis, and are mobilised to create and cultivate social relationships with local individuals (I may have abused my interlocutors’ hospitality as, according to the same Hadis, guests are not expected to stay for more than three days).
Marriage
Berna struggles to get from her bedroom to the kitchen, with large heavy bags falling off her shoulders and a tense smile, for this will be a busy day for her: in the morning, she will pick up her wedding dress at a bridal shop downtown; in the afternoon, she will set up the apartment newly rented by her fiancé, with the trousseau her uncle has brought her from Turkey. Berna is having some problems with her wedding dress. She is having a hard time making Brazilian tailors, who are unfamiliar with Islamic moral codes, understand that her dress cannot show any of her back, chest or arm skin. Reyhan accompanies Berna on her journey and helps her with the numerous bags and suitcases that carry her trousseau. Reyhan is the most suitable among the other women in the house to accompany Berna in this endeavour, since she has been searching for a husband herself; therefore, wedding arrangements are within her interests.
Reyhan, like the other single women in the community, will only marry inside the Hizmet Movement – she believes that the right husband for her must be a Turkish Muslim and a follower of Gülen, because ‘a couple should share the same culture, beliefs and moral values to be able to make their marriage work’, as she stated. With the help of the single women's abla, Reyhan, 23 and still an undergraduate, has already met a candidate who is also a member of the Hizmet community in Brazil, but she did not like him. When I asked her why, she answered that she did not like him in general and concluded, a little embarrassed: ‘There was no electricity.’10
Berna would like to stay in Brazil, but it is not up to her to decide, as her husband-to-be might be required to migrate to another country – it depends on Hizmet and its needs. After all, home can be made to exist (almost) anywhere, as long as they can practise hizmet, as I heard so many times. Berna's limited autonomy to decide over her future is not seen in a negative way, for being useful to Hizmet is more important than individual projects. As observed by Pnina Werbner (2003), it is not unusual for transnational religious movements to support worldly orientations for individual success and autonomy while reinforcing communal projects to the detriment of individual goals and achievements. This limited autonomy produces, however, a tension in the embodied self among women in the Hizmet community in Brazil. If it is true that they tend to ‘feel at home’ anywhere they can practise hizmet, they usually do not choose the place or time to make a new home.
Domestic Economy
At 9 o'clock the house is empty. Its inhabitants have gone out to their scientific educational activities – undergraduate courses are usually in Pedagogy, Mathematics, Physiotherapy and Biology. Nesibe, Fatme and Latife return home around noon. The first two women do not eat, for they are doing voluntary fasting; instead, they perform öğle namazı, the noon prayer, together; Latife, who has her period and, therefore, is not expected to fast or pray, heats up a plate of pasta from the previous day, before leaving in a hurry for a class. Fatme goes to her bedroom to study for an upcoming test. Beyza and Dilek arrive home, drop off their Portuguese class books, pray and leave the house again for another class. Meanwhile, Azra performs öğle namazı in a reserved room at the hospital where she works as an intern.
Nesibe goes out to the grocery store, since she is in charge of that evening's dinner. To pay for the groceries, Nesibe uses part of the monthly allowance the students receive from the community administrative centre in order to bear all their daily costs – for example, food, transportation and school supplies. Domesticities in the students’ house are regulated by the collective budget and its equal distribution, which is seen by them as fair and sufficient. The production of ‘enough solidarity to protect the collective good’ (Douglas 1991: 299) rests on the idea of sacrifice not only for the preservation of the ‘Hizmet house’ where they live, but also for the prosperity of the translocal Hizmet community and the continuation of the Hizmet Movement as a whole.
As Douglas (1991: 299) points out in her observations on the idea of a home, fair distribution of resources occurs in practice through division of labour, rotation and vigilance, assuring an effective coordination of resources by all inhabitants. Rotation concerning the role of the abla of the house allows control of one another in budget administration, hinders inequality of access to resources and requires that each and every person learns how to make collective costs meet the available budget. Coordination in a ‘Hizmet house’ is also achieved through a division of labour that is periodically renewed in the name of fairness, such as cleaning the bathroom, preparing Sunday breakfast or fixing tea in the evenings. That way the inhabitants see each other as equally responsible for the common good, not only their temporary house, but also their translocal community.
Leila prays on the bus on her way home from the university. She closes her eyes, mentally recites the words in Arabic and imagines herself doing rakat, the corresponding gestures that constitute the ritual. According to her explanation, the intention to worship God (niyet) through prayer, even when it is performed in an unsuitable circumstance (such as in a bus), makes it valid. Ethnographic studies have shown that Islamic prayer requires no specific place (Metcalf 1996) and that its techniques may be negotiated by the faithful themselves (Boursin 2017). For his part, Gülen's speeches connect purity of intention to loyalty in servitude to God, referring directly to the very notion of hizmet.
Nesibe returns from the supermarket, puts away the groceries and removes the helal (licit) meat from the freezer. The stock of helal meat guarantees, for some months, food supply in a context that is foreign to their food restrictions. Anticipating and planning future needs is ‘an organization of space over time’ and ‘a distinctive characteristic of the idea of home’ (Douglas 1991: 294–295). The stock of helal meat and Turkish ingredients and spices, such as tea, olives, pepper, dried herbs, chocolate and jam, relates to that capacity for predicting and anticipating in order to meet future needs, since access to these items in local (and even national) contexts can be quite limited.
Drowned in household chores, Nesibe forgets she has been fasting and drinks a glass of water, realising her mistake immediately. Disappointed, she turns to Fatme and tells her about the involuntary breaking of her fast. Fatme advises her friend to ignore it and continue fasting as there was no intention of breaking it, but Nesibe finds it more correct to intentionally break the ruined fast and try again the next day. Nesibe's attitude towards her fasting mobilises rationality, reflexivity and effort in ‘the embodiment in ritual practice of’ the habitus (Csordas 1990: 29) of an ideal Muslim. Nesibe, then, quickly fixes herself a tomato and cucumber salad before heading to her first day of her internship in a nursing home for the elderly.
Fatme, in turn, heads out to an international NGO where she works as a volunteer. According to her account, she was interested in joining that organisation because it was a promising place to meet people from other countries, learn English and help to promote dialogue among students of different cultures. In addition, it is an opportunity to expand her social network and thus represent her country and her religion not only to Brazilians but also to young people from all over the world – it is her own way of performing hizmet, as she explained to me.
Azra is doing an internship in a public hospital as part of her postgraduation course. She lives countless experiences with patients and co-workers, which include cultural clashes, but also affection and mutual support, according to her accounts. She considers the difficulties she usually goes through worthwhile sacrifices, both personally and professionally. She transforms the prejudices she faces as a veiled Muslim woman into opportunities to deconstruct negative images about Islam and Muslims through her actions and attitudes; after all, this is one of the main actions that constitute hizmet in her opinion. For her, to remain within the community's spatial boundaries, without interacting with Brazilian individuals, does not make sense to one who does hizmet in the hicret. Azra is having a hard time deciding upon her future, though. She has been fighting for her right to continue her education before thinking about marriage. The community authorities insisted on her getting married right after graduation, which she managed to negotiate with the help of her younger brother, also a student under the Hizmet community management in Brazil.
In the student house, the prescribed prayer schedule is organised in such a way that students have a large time span to perform öğle (from 12:30 to 15:30), ikindi (from 16:00 to 18:00) and yatsı namazı (from 20:00 to midnight). The ‘adjustment’ of the religious practices (Henkel 2005) to their student life is a process that allows both the religious and the secular schedules (studies and class) to coexist without conflicting. Negotiations of prayer time, location and techniques attest to a plasticity of this ritual practice, which varies according to ‘individuals’ lifestyles, environments, and schedule’ (Boursin 2017: 632).
Sociability
In the late afternoon, Dilek and Beyza come home in order to perform akşam namazı, the sunset prayer, after which they go down to the only Hizmet school in Brazil, which is on the corner of the street where they live; Dilek and Beyza are in charge of taking care of some female children from the community after school hours. They return home with three teenagers who spend the night at their house twice a week, in order to study and socialise. Practices of socialisation constitute a pedagogical method in the Hizmet Movement, since they are a means of learning and embodying moral principles (Vicini 2020).
In the hicret, the constant sociability between university students and their ablas’ children also works as a mechanism of control over processes of cultural variation. As noted by Fredrik Barth (1969), the mobilisation of mechanisms contrary to cultural variation aims at fostering cultural discontinuities between ethnic groups, reinforcing the myth of cultural homogeneity and sharing. These practices of sociability also take place during the weekends and, usually, within the community's physical structure. This way, the children and the university students’ free time is shaped by the community's domesticities, reducing contact with the outside world, in this case Brazilian society.
This also works as a mechanism to reaffirm and reproduce their national, cultural and religious identities by means of material arrangements and elements that allude to Turkey, Islam and the Hizmet Movement through the senses. Hot Turkish tea, kernels and spices give a familiar flavour to a sociability marked by the exclusive use of the Turkish language in a house furnished with Turkish velvet couches, carpets and diaphanous curtains, whose walls are decorated with pictures of Istanbul landscapes and prints of Islamic formulas in Gülen's handwriting. The sensorial experience in student houses conveys familiar forms and memories both to develop a sense of home and to create a sense of identity and belonging (Miller 2001). ‘[A]t the intersection of materiality, emotion, social relations, and the practices of dwelling’ (Samanani and Lenhard 2023: 7) values are communicated and reproduced.
Growing Up
Nesibe works hard in the kitchen preparing dinner. Since they have a guest, the anthropologist, a special dessert is fixed to top off the night. These young women did not know how to cook when they left Turkey, where they lived with their families or in student dormitories. In the Hizmet community in Brazil, far away from their relatives, there is no one to cook or do the household chores for them.
This is why to do hizmet in the hicret is considered by my interlocutors a means to ‘grow up’.11 By living in a student house, they learn how to cook, clean the house, take care of their own clothes and, more importantly, live with ‘others’, as Elma pointed out to me. The development of certain dispositions, such as patience, tolerance and understanding, was indicated by Elma as a condition of coexistence with other women with whom one often has little in common. When she accepted to marry, at the age of 20 and still an undergraduate at a Brazilian university, Elma understood that ‘surviving’ the student house had provided her with the necessary tools to be able to live well with another person, and thus to be a good wife, she told me while laughing.
While the chocolate cream puffs fill the house with a warm sweet smell, everyone gets together in the living room to read the Quran. The collective practice of reciting the Quran is ideally performed aloud; however, different rhythms and paces mean that my interlocutors choose to recite it individually, each one in her own time. Latife, who cannot pray or touch the Quran because of her period, reads Gülen's latest book.
Reyhan arrives from Berna's new apartment, where she helped with cleaning and tidying up. She sits next to her colleagues and chooses to read one of the volumes of Nursi's Risale-i Nur. Leila does not have time to participate in the Quranic recitation, as she has to run some errands for the community.
The End of a Journey
Nesibe announces that dinner is ready. Normally, Azra would be home by now, but she had to accompany an abla who does not speak Portuguese to a public hospital. Azra, who speaks Portuguese fluently, usually fulfils this function when an abla needs to see a doctor.
Latife extends a tablecloth on the living room rug; Dilek and Fatme bring the plates, cutlery and glasses from the kitchen. The young women and the anthropologist sit on the rug, around the tablecloth; some lean on the three purple velvet couches that surround the living room. Dinner goes on with chit-chat, jokes, laughter and lots of Turkish tea.
Dinner is the collective meal par excellence in this student house, because it is the time of the day when everyone is at home. Personal matters are rarely talked about in the group, and the predominant themes are general and casual, so as to avoid parallel conversations, embarrassing situations or exposing anyone. Dinnertime marks the end of the day with relaxation and fun, leaving negotiations, personal claims and decisions for the next day.
Dilek places her laptop on top of a chair in the centre of the living room and plays the Bamteli video from Herkul, one of the movement's websites. Bamteli is Gülen's weekly sohbet (in practice, a sermon) and is the means by which Gülen speaks to his audience: electronically, he is present everywhere, as is well observed by Carter Vaughn Findley (2010). Some on the floor, others on couches, all the young women turn their attention to the laptop screen and eventually make notes.
Azra returns home and joins her peers around the laptop. At the end of the video, they prepare to discuss the points they found most relevant in Gülen's sermon, but at that moment Berna enters through the door. She is tired and hungry. Between a forkful of potatoes and a sip of Turkish tea, Berna gives a full account of the setbacks she had with her wedding dress. After four hours of negotiations in the bridal shop, the dress was finally ‘closed’ (kapalı) and suited to the moral principles of modesty and purity embodied as part of Berna's self. Despite all the fatigue, Berna is happy and pleased, since she was able to solve the last pending matters for the beginning of her new life. She is ready to marry and become an abla.
Following the last glass of hot Turkish tea, the young women and their pupils perform yatsı namazı and tesbihatı, the night prayer and the corresponding tesbihat. Although most of the practices that make up the students’ disciplinary programme are usually performed individually, sabah (dawn) and yatsı (night) prayers are performed collectively, because at the corresponding times of the day they are all at home. But ‘everything in hizmet has a reason’, they tell me: dawn prayer ‘opens’ the day, thus preparing them for their journey; night prayer is the ideal time for self-examination, when they should critically reflect upon everything they did during the day, pointing to the concept of self-accountability.
At the end of the ritual, Leila and Nesibe sit on the rug to make du'as, while the others go to their bedrooms. Berna hangs her wedding dress in the wardrobe and irons the wedding veil her uncle brought her from Turkey. This is an Islamic wedding veil, which covers the whole head and neck. Berna is happy and relieved she finally has an appropriate dress to match her bridal veil made in Turkey.
Conclusion
The committed young Muslim women in this article made hicret to Brazil as a way to fulfil a divine mission: to contribute to spreading the Hizmet Movement world view, to represent (Turkish) Islam in a non-Muslim-majority country and to become cultivated Muslims. While members of the Hizmet community in Brazil, they perform a disciplinary programme that includes religious and homemaking practices in the pursuit of becoming ideal Muslim women and feeling at home in the hicret. The embodied self is confident and equipped with moral reasoning, skills and abilities to be and act in the world regardless of the national, cultural or social context.
However, this broad ‘agentival capacity’ (Mahmood 2005: 15) exists through the cultivation and reproduction not only of a specific Turkish Muslim self, but also of a related Turkish Muslim space, a ‘Hizmet home’. The embodied moral, cognitive and affective dispositions connect the self to the Hizmet Movement, its religious leader and the Islamic tradition as it is framed by him. By inhabiting hizmet norms, therefore, the embodied self becomes encapsulated by hizmet's moral and physical structure in the hicret. If home ‘is always a localizable idea’, as Douglas (1991: 289) states, we could add that, for my interlocutors, home is localised in a space that is appropriated and transformed for and through the practice of hizmet. Being ‘at home in the world’ (Jackson 1995) is conditioned by living through hizmet, that is, by making a ‘Hizmet home’ and being part of the ‘Hizmet family’. This condition produces a tension in the embodied self, since the women's individual autonomy is constrained by the communal projects of the ‘Hizmet family’.
Acknowledgements
Funded by the European Union. I thank Nadia Fadil and our research group at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven for their comments and suggestions on the first draft of this article.
Notes
Abla literally means ‘older sister’ and is how most members of the community address me. This is a respectful form of treatment used by community members when addressing a woman.
Hicret is the Turkish version of the Arabic hijra, which can be literally translated as ‘departure’, ‘emigration’ or ‘flight’. It is pronounced hijret (in Turkish, the letter ‘c’ is pronounced as ‘j’ in English).
‘Hadis’, from the Arabic ‘Hadith’, is a collection of the Prophet Muhammad's sayings and deeds.
By ‘modern’, I mean here the view that knowledge can be directly accessed by the individual through reason and self-consciousness, in which the modern individual is taken as ‘a fundamental form of thought and action’ (Mauss 1938: 281).
Following Agai (2007: 163), I call ‘Islamised’ practices the apparently mundane activities that are performed as an act of worship.
This multisited fieldwork included encounters with Hizmet participants in Brazil, Turkey, Argentina, South Africa and the US.
The data presented in this article were collected during fieldwork in Brazil in the framework of my PhD dissertation. The writing process, including the analysis and interpretation, was conducted while in my postdoc.
In fact, in Turkey, whether within or outside religious communities, abla is not a term used specifically to address a married woman. The social configuration of the Hizmet community in Brazil, however, has led to a distinction between married and single women.
Gülen has published four volumes on the Sufi tradition called The Emerald Hills of the Heart: Key Concepts in the Practice of Sufism.
According to Reyhan's explanation, we could understand ‘electricity’ as an analogy between physical phenomena and sexual attraction between two people.
I heard the same thing from male and other female interlocutors who stayed in Hizmet dormitories or student houses when they went to high school or university in Turkish cities that were far away from their parents’ house.
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