Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish Muslim scholar, thinker, author, poet, opinion leader, educational activist, and preacher emeritus. He is regarded as the initiator and inspirer of the worldwide social movement of human values so-called the Service Movement or the Gülen Movement. He is respected by his adherents as a living model of high values like wisdom, faith, love, ardor, respect, sincerity, piety, sensitivity, plainness, and service to human concerns. Gülen is considered among the most influential intellectuals and civil activists not only of the modern Turkey but also of the entire globe. He was listed among the top hundred public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine and he got most of the votes in the online ballot in which more than half a million people participated (July/August 2008). However, such accolades do not distract him from striving to focus primarily on his own existence by staying no more than “a self among selves” as he most refers to, and be friend to all. He considers himself only one of the volunteers of the movement and denounces being its leader, in spending most of his time in personal interests such as reading, worshiping, and taking medical care. He has always been known by his deep respect and relatedness to all creation that as though he falls together with leaves and dies before victims. He might be seen so "romantic" in that “he can recite hundreds of poems by heart,” of course, often tearfully. In his word, “living for having others live” tells the core principle of his understanding of service. His position of sympathy, dialogue, and coexistence can be best reflected in a comparison with that of Rumi, one of his inspirers, that while the latter calls, whirling, "Come, come, whoever you are; ours is not the caravan of despair," Gülen seems to announce, walking, "I am coming, whoever you are; is not ours the journey of hope?"

Gülen was born of a humble family in Erzurum, Turkey, in 1941, and raised in a spiritually generous environment. Upon graduation from a private divinity school in hometown and being extraordinarily trained in religious sciences and morality as well, he was awarded a state clergy license and began to preach and teach in Edirne, a province at the European side of the country. In this period of his youth, he had opportunity to deepen in Islamic traditions, informally study the principles and theories of social and natural sciences, and examine the classics of both Eastern and Western philosophy and literature. Among all, he was especially impressed by the work of Said Nursi, the renowned scholar of both the late Ottoman and modern Turkey periods. It was his broad-ranged reading attitude that equipped him for his well-known comprehensive interpretations. In the age of twenty-five, he was promoted to a post in Izmir, the largest province of the west coast of Turkey, where Gülen’s outstanding discourse began to crystallize and his audience to expand. He traveled from city to city to give sermons in mosques, speeches at gatherings in various places including coffee houses. Speaking on essential subjects ranging from total peace and social justice to evolutionary naturalism, and stimulating consciences to high values, his primary aim always remained as urging the younger generation to harmonize intellectual enlightenment with wise spirituality and serve fellow humans without intending mundane goals, which he passionately called the ideal of the golden generation.

Gülen’s discourse, which had been easily distinguished by its being full of sensitivity, knowledge, and all references, attracted the attention of the academic community, especially the student body, as well as common people all around the country. His speeches were recorded in tapes, distributed even in villages, and zealously embraced. As he frankly asserts, he simply thought to value this public credit, “though he never deserved it,” in canalizing good intentions and devoted endeavors towards an initially national and subsequently universal ideal, which is being unified around high human values by means of education and dialogue. Regarding this ideal, Gülen have always named his function as “advice” or “request” at most. Specially impressed by such modesty and humbleness, quite large of those who heard him from public responded his soulful voice by voluntarily gathering on the mentioned ideal, and naturally generated a movement which would be in time called “Service” (Hizmet, in Turkish). Volunteers of the service, consisting of students, academicians, businessmen, employees, officials, farmers, men and women, young and old, contributed to multiple ways of service, which shaped in schools, colleges, hospitals, relief organizations, publishing houses, and media, both in Turkey and more than a hundred countries of the world.

As a preacher emeritus, Gülen gave his most celebrated series of sermons between 1988 and 1991 at great gatherings. His audience now was his adherents, which made him preach from within and hence more emotionally. At the latter date he gave up preaching at all, and kept having conversation everyday with his visitors, sharing thoughts and feelings, listening to and responding their concerns and questions of any subjects. Only as from 1994, Gülen appeared at public arena by participating popular dialogue meetings in which almost all components of the society were represented and had chance to know openly each other. Following this appearance, a doubt was set forth and grown by some circles that the movement might be insincere in declaring to be apolitical and might hold a hidden agenda for carrying the state outside the principle of secularism. Gülen himself numerously refused such accusations by referring to all history of the movement to be above politics and defending the genuine sense of secularism ("state's being respectful to values of all society without discrimination") and even suggesting handing over the movement’s institutions, which had already been legal, to the state’s relevant departments. However, the controversy (or "campaign") became so perturbing that eventually caused him consider to retreat from public arena. In 1998, he went to the United States of America on occasion of a medical treatment, suffering from diabetes and heart condition, and later on tended to stay there in tranquility, in Pensyllvania, where he still lives "alone" and humbly welcomes his few visitors.

This statement is mainly based on Gülen’s biographical interview, Küçük Dünyam (Istanbul: Ufuk, 2006), his latest publications, the series of Kırık Testi (7 volumes, Istanbul), and the biographical analysis about Gülen by Ali Ünal, Bir Portre Denemesi (Istanbul: Nil, 2002).