In 1975 the Turkish politician Necmettin Erbakan published a manifesto that he gave the title Millî Görüş, ‘The National Vision’. It spoke only in the most general terms of moral and religious education but devoted much attention to industrialization, development and economic independence. It warned against further rapprochement towards Europe, considering the Common Market to be a Zionist and Catholic project for the assimilation and de-Islamization of Turkey and called instead for closer economic co-operation with Muslim countries. The name of Millî Görüş would remain associated with a religio-political movement and a series of Islamist parties inspired by Mr. Erbakan, one succeeding the other as they were banned for violating Turkey’s laïcité legislation. Following the ban of the Virtue (Fazilet) Party, a rift that had been developing in the movement resulted in two parties taking its place, the Felicity (Saadet) Party representing Erbakan’s old guard, and the Justice and Development (AK) Party led by younger and more pragmatic politicians around Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who claim to have renounced on a specifically Islamist agenda. The AK Party convincingly won the 2002 elections and formed a government with a strong popular mandate, that brought Turkey closer to acceptance for membership in the European Union than any previous government had done.

Among the Turkish immigrants in Western Europe, Milli Görüş became one of the major, if not the major, religious movement, controlling numerous mosques. Like the movement in Turkey, it went through some remarkable changes, not least because the first generation, which was strongly oriented towards what happened in Turkey, is gradually surrendering leadership to a younger generation that grew up in Europe and is concerned with entirely different matters. Milli Görüş’ public profile shows considerable differences from one country to the next, suggesting that nature of the interaction with the ‘host’ societies may have as much of an impact on its character as a religious movement as the relationship with the ‘mother’ movement in Turkey.