In a 2012 article in The Daily Beast, Margaret Spiegelman recounts her experiences as an English teacher at a Gülenist school in Turkey. Gülen’s teachings, she reveals, place women in a position of subordination that runs counter to 21st century values. She quickly learned that women have no place in the Gülen Movement, and the Gülen Movement has no place in the modern world.

I had never heard of the Cemaat when I answered an ad in the fall of 2010 to teach English to grade-schoolers at Çağ Fatih College, a chic private academy run by Gülenist educators in suburban Istanbul.

Gülen’s writing is unapologetically anti-feminist. In his book Pearls of Wisdom, he writes that women are jewels, flowers, and chandeliers, but the wrong kind of woman is death: “A dissolute woman who does not know her true self destroys existing homes and turns them into graves.”

There are no women administrators at Çağ Fatih College. I never even met the principal, nor any of the five teachers who filled the position of vice principal at my school. They are all men. The same is true at Istanbul’s six other Fatih Colleges. While the great majority of their elementary-school teachers are women, all the administrators are men. At department meetings and teacher conferences, men sit at the front of the room, women at the back.

The other women were required to call the vice principal on duty and ask permission if they needed to run errands during their free periods, for example. The teacher was frustrated that as a woman she isn’t trusted to manage her own time, or come and go freely. She wouldn’t be surprised, she said, if she lost her job for “talking too much.”

While Gülen schools may represent the most conservative corner of middle-class society, many Turks worry that the movement’s influence is growing. A friend of mine who teaches at Istanbul University fears she might lose her job. Newly appointed administrators—Cemaat, she calls them, for their religious and political conservatism—have told her students that she’s a communist and that her extracurricular music club was a subversive organization.

She believes she’s being targeted because she’s a secular woman and because of her friendship with a Jewish colleague.

Full article available here.