Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on the connections between the shaping of religious subjectivity and the production of layers of belonging among members of the Gülen community in Brazil by analysing the performance of their religious ritual practices.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on the connections between the shaping of religious subjectivity and the production of layers of belonging among members of the Gülen community in Brazil. It analyses the religious ritual practices that are performed by community members as part of their religious service (hizmet), understood as a means through which develop themselves, both intellectually and morally, and at the same time reform global society. Those religious ritual practices comprehend prayers, obligatory and optional, as well as various kinds of supplications. Members of the Gülen community in Brazil are participants of the Gülen Movement, named after the charismatic religious leader Fethullah Gülen, who was held responsible for the failed coup in Turkey by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After the failed coup and the ensuing crackdown on the Gülen Movement, religious rituals performed by members of the Gülen community in Brazil included supplications that asked God and Prophet Muhammad to help the Movement participants who were emprisioned as suspects in the attempted coup - and remain in prison - and also to save Turkey by putting the nation on the Movement's pathway. These inclusions to the religious ritual practices of community members correspond to the Movement's discourse on hizmet as a service to mankind; while also highlighting the connections between subjectivity and the production of senses of belonging, both to a religious community and an objectified nation, amidst participants. The data presented here were collected during ethnographic fieldwork with the Gülen community in Brazil between March 2015 and February 2020.