Hizmet Movement, A Lived Experience, and Introspections on Pedagogy

About the author

Dr. Koray Lynx (formerly Yusuf İncetaş) was born into a Turkish Gastarbeiter family in Germany. He started elementary school there, but later fi nished his secondary and college education in Turkey. He lived and worked in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and the United States. After serving in the U.S. Army, he worked as a certifi ed public-school teacher in Illinois, taught English as a second language at Harvard University, and pursued a career as a Turkish language instructor at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He is currently Chair of the Teacher Preparation Program at Heritage University in Toppenish, Washington, the only higher education institution founded on Yakama Nation land. He has a PhD in secondary and continuing education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is married to David Lynx, and has two cats; Groot, a Zen master, and Leyla, a drama queen.

About the book

This book is first in its category to reflect a lived experience from a phenomenological viewpoint within the Hizmet Movement (HM). Through the author’s lens, you will read about the transformation of HM along with his own over a span of three decades. Moreover, the book does not shy away from sensitive subjects such as LGBTQA+ topics in this Turkey-based, Muslim educational movement. This book took more than five years to complete and includes a brief history of the Turkish Republic and the HM, details from Gülen’s life, his and other HM participants’ overlapping philosophies on education and language, and the arduous interview process to put this book together. A full copy of the interview with Mr. Fethullah Gülen on education and language is available at the end of the book.

This would be an excellent source for educational psychology departments, teacher training programs, political science, and theology majors.