Gulen Schools Turkish Olympiads Kambocya (Cambodia) - Zaman International School

This young girl from Gulen's school in Cambodia (Kambocya) is shown participating in Gulen's worldwide Turkish Olympiad singing in Turkish. The School is called Zaman International School (same name as Gulen's Today's Zaman Media)  and is state of the art equipment and building.  The paper below was written about the Gulen Movement in Cambodia by a Gulen member from the UK.  This is another private school started by Turkish Businessmen, never saw so many Turkish Businessmen opening schools OUTSIDE of Turkey.
Gulen keeps up the Dog and Pony Show as the world educates themselves on the agenda of the Gulen Movement.

http://www.gulenconference.org.uk/userfiles/file/Proceedings/Prcd%20-%20Bruckmayr,%20P.pdf

Excerpt:

The only Cambodian non-religious and non-discriminatory educational facility operated

from a Muslim country is Phnom Penh’s Zaman International School. It was founded in 1997

and is associated with the Fethullah Gülen movement. Classes are taught in both Khmer

and English. Its kindergarten, primary and high schools are attended by Khmers, resident

foreigners and a few Chams. For them, apart from the high standard provided by the school,

its explicit agenda of instruction on an inter-racial and inter-religious basis, coupled with its

prestige as an institution operated from Muslim lands, serves to make the school a valuable

alternative to both secular private schools and Islamic schools.

This paper raises and discusses the interesting question of the applicability of Gülen’s thought

on education and inter-faith relations to the periphery of Southeast Asian Islam.

Introduction

Fethullah Gülen is a former Turkish state imam, who has risen to become Turkey’s most

famous Islamic intellectual. He is by now widely known as a elaborate supporter of inter-religious

dialogue, pluralism, tolerance and democracy1. Most important for the present study,

the probably most striking aspect of his thought is the conviction, that acquiring and transmitting

secular knowledge, as well as supplying people with the means to do so, is in perfect

accordance with and in fact demanded by Islamic ideals2. Gülen’s thought has attracted a

considerable following, which has grown into a whole Gülen-inspired movement with an

education network as its basis (Yavuz & Esposito 2003; Agai 2004). Starting out by establishing

schools and student hostels in Turkey, the movement has since the early 1990s founded

Turkish secular schools in many countries in Europe, Asia, America, Africa and Australia3.

While taking into account, that Phnom Penh is not a potential inter-religious powder keg as

is Zamboanga on Mindanao, which houses the Gülen network’s “Turkish-Philippine School

of Tolerance” (Michel 2003, 70), it is important to view the movement’s agenda of education

and ethics across religious and ethnic boundaries in the contemporary Cambodian context, to

assess its possible contribution to both the Khmers’ and the Chams’ plight in a country which

still has to recover from the repercussions of Khmer Rouges rule from 1975-1979. This is

even more so, if one considers, that a prime field of the movement’s activities are countries

under former communist rule like the Central Asian republics and Albania (Agai 2004, 272-

280; Turam 2003, 184-207, Agai 2003, 66-68). Although, as far as Central Asia is concerned,

common Turkic-ness plays a major role in describing the motivations of both Gülen himself

and of his movement’s activists there (Agai 2004, 224-229; Turam 2003, 188-202), it is

nevertheless often stated, that “the moral vacuum left by communism” (Again 2004, 344) is

something to be confronted by the movement’s efforts in the field of education. Moreover,

Gülen’s thought on living in non-Muslim lands (Yılmaz 2003, 234-237) should, in the face

of worldwide Islamic resurgence, be valuable for all Muslim minorities and immigrant communities

around the globe.

In this paper, I am arguing, that the thought of Fethullah Gülen is valuable for the Cambodian

Chams in several aspects, including their coexistence with the Buddhist Khmer majority,

intra-community harmony, and their quests for both empowerment and identity preservation

through education. The latter factor is practically and exemplarily related to the Zaman

International School in Phnom Penh.

The Zaman International School of Phnom Penh and the Gülen

Network

The private Zaman International School was founded in 1997 by the Turkish journalist Attila

Yusuf Guleker. With over 700 hundred students enrolled, it is educating more boys and girls

than similar Phnom Penh private schools like the International School of Phnom Penh or

Northbridge International School.

It has already been stressed that, due to the instrumental role played by followers of Fethullah Gülen in the recent spread of Turkish private schools around the globe19, such institutions are, albeit officially classified merely as “private institutions”, automatically associated with

the Gülen network by the Turkish state and public, and especially by the network’s activists

(Agai 2004, 13 n.8)

http://www.independentschools.com/cambodia/zaman-international-school_35259.html

http://khmer111.blogspot.com/2010/08/zaman-international-school-cambodia.html

State of the art Zaman International School in Cambodia
If this is not a Turkish Islamic School why is the Turkish Flag
on the building next to the Cambodian Flag?\

Gulen Movement if you are reading what gives you the right to put the Turkish flag in other countries?  You embarass and shame us all by this act of aggression.