The Intercultural Dialogue Platform (IDP) hosted a roundtable in Brussels with Professor Sophia Pandya, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and one of the foremost academic authorities on women, Islam, and the Hizmet movement. A Fulbright scholar, Professor Pandya has spent years conducting fieldwork within Hizmet, including personal interviews with the movement’s late founder, Fethullah Gülen. Her published work includes Muslim Women and Islamic Resurgence, a co-edited volume on Hizmet’s transnational charitable activities, and her forthcoming manuscript focuses specifically on the movement’s women, with the Brussels roundtable offering one of its first public previews in Europe.
For an organisation whose work is grounded in dialogue across cultures and faiths, the invitation was a natural fit. Before an engaged Brussels audience, Professor Pandya led a wide-ranging discussion on women’s leadership, resilience, and civic engagement within Hizmet and on what these mean for the movement’s future.
From the Periphery to the Centre
Professor Pandya opened by inviting participants to look beyond common perception of women as passive or marginal. Hizmet emerged in 1960s Turkey around the conviction that society is improved through education, and that serving others is a religious duty. Fethullah Gülen, shaped in part by his intellectual predecessor, Said Nursî, held that building schools was more significant than building mosques, a position Professor Pandya described as strikingly distinctive among contemporary Islamic scholars. Inspired by the ideas of Fethullah Gülen, the Hizmet movement has contributed to the establishment of thousands of educational institutions, dialogue centres, charities, and other civil society organisations across more than 160 countries.
She identified 1990, when Hizmet opened its first girls’ school, as the turning point. Hundreds more followed, first across Turkey’s rural regions and eventually from Nigeria to Pakistan to Afghanistan, many focused on mathematics, science and technology. Dormitories staffed by female mentors known as ablas reassured conservative families and gave rural girls the confidence to pursue their education in the city, often for the first time. The result, she said, has been a generation of women who became engineers, physicists, computer scientists, teachers and professors, professions rarely associated, in outside perception, with observant Muslim women, and a reality she suggested earlier scholarship simply failed to document because researchers never thought to ask.
Drawing on her own interviews with Gülen, she recounted that he believed women should be free to work in any field, and that when asked whether a woman could one day lead the movement, he pointedly declined to rule it out.
A Distinct Model of Leadership
One of the most original threads of the discussion concerned the Sufi character of Hizmet’s spiritual tradition. Professor Pandya explained that Sufism has long placed greater emphasis on the spiritual than the physical, historically creating space for women to attain high standing within their communities, since in matters of the spirit, gender becomes secondary. She pointed to Gülen’s own admiration for the eighth-century Sufi figure Rabia al-Adawiyya, and to his broader model of leadership through humility and service, in which patience, compassion and emotional openness are actively encouraged. In her account, this spiritual orientation has helped cultivate a culture more attuned to recognising women’s roles and contributions.
Adversity Met with Civic Awakening
The conversation turned to the aftermath of the failed coup attempt in Turkey in July 2016, after which tens of thousands of Hizmet participants were displaced or forced to leave the country, with women bearing a particular share of the hardship. Yet the crisis also catalysed something new: for the first time, women of a movement long averse to politics engaged directly in public advocacy, organising campaigns, advocating on behalf of mothers and babies affected, and building lasting coalitions with other women’s rights organisations. Professor Pandya described this as a durable evolution, reinforced by a younger generation, increasingly raised in the diaspora, that is pressing the movement toward greater openness, transparency and dialogue.
Voices from the Roundtable
The exchange with participants was lively and practical. Asked how to overcome the cultural reluctance some women feel about joining mixed decision-making bodies, Professor Pandya offered a concrete diagnosis: many women are simply carrying professional, family and volunteer responsibilities all at once. Men, she argued, should treat this as their own problem to solve by sharing domestic and caregiving work, actively making space for women in meetings, and taking care not to talk over them.
Asked whether the political engagement of Hizmet women since 2016 was a passing phase or a lasting transformation, Professor Pandya was clear: it is continuous. The experience has made members more attuned to injustice broadly, many young people are training as human-rights lawyers and psychologists, and the networks women built to advocate for imprisoned mothers have deepened their engagement with wider causes ever since.
Participants also asked what European civil society might learn from these experiences. Professor Pandya urged audiences to keep the empathy high on refugees, describing Hizmet members abroad as people eager to work hard and contribute, and she highlighted the movement’s long practice of interfaith and intercultural dialogue as an antidote to polarisation, an effort, in her words, to turn walls into tables where people who disagree can still eat together.
A Living, Evolving Story
What emerged clearly across the discussion was a shared recognition that the role of women within Hizmet continues to evolve in ways that appear increasingly irreversible. The conversation also touched on the challenge of impostor syndrome, a common experience that can lead many women to underestimate their abilities or hesitate to pursue leadership opportunities. The session concluded with an encouragement that extended well beyond Hizmet: for women everywhere to move forward with confidence, to take up space, and, in Professor Pandya’s words, to “seize the world.”
For IDP, the afternoon reaffirmed the value of hosting platforms for serious, scholarly dialogue on subjects too often reduced to caricature. Judging by the depth of engagement in the room, and a discussion that could easily have continued well beyond its allotted time, interest in an honest and informed conversation about the role of women in service, faith and civic life remains very much alive in Brussels and, one suspects, well beyond it.
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