Hizmet Global Group

History of The Hizmet Movement

The Hizmet Movement incubated in the 1960s, it became nationwide in the 1980s, and then once it was recognized by the masses, it globalized through educational initiatives in 1990s. Hizmet is a Turkish word that simply means “service” and refers to services that are altruistic and directed to the ‘common good’.

1970 – 1980
in the history of Hizmet Movement

Focus on Education

For the past four decades, the focus of the movement has been to address local needs like education through human values. The Hizmet Movement was initiated in the late 1960s in Izmir, a province in western Turkey, and focused on education because there was a great need for improvement in educational access and quality throughout the country. Even though the government was working hard to improving the country’s educational services, there was much more to be done. Fethullah Gulen, and those inspired by him, portrayed exemplary civic engagement by seriously tackling the two crucial issues of educational access and quality.

To address this educational shortcoming, Gulen and those inspired by him initiated their first project of creating a dormitory to accommodate students that come to the city for education because of the lack of schools in their hometown. They started this project with a handful of university students, and a few small business owners, but little did they know that their efforts was the first project of the globalized Hizmet Movement we know today. The project started with students and small business men setting aside money from their own pockets to aid students for their educational and living expenses, then raising enough money to build a dormitory for these students. Over time, more funding was collected and more dormitories were created.

These dormitories served as shelters against the all forms of harms like drug use and extremist political involvement in a time when leftist and rightist political groups were actively and violently fighting each other. Seeing the violent political activism taking more than 5000 lives over numerous incidents in the 1970s had families believe the Hizmet Dorms were the safest environment families could send their kids for education.

As the number of students traveling to Izmir for education increased, the project proved successful. As these students graduated, they scored impressively on university entrance exams and got accepted to