The stage erupts into flashing blue and white light. The music is thunderous. A little girl from Mozambique appears, dressed in a traditional costume.
"Hello Turkey,” she shouts in Turkish, the microphone fastened behind her right ear, Houston ground control-style. "Turkey," she shouts again, "I want to see your hands."
The crowd of 15,000 applauds furiously. A television camera on a 10-metre-long gantry swings across the stage towards her. Close-ups of her face appear on two huge screens immediately behind her and on television screens across Turkey.
There is a brief moment of silent expectation. And then the little girl from Mozambique begins singing a Turkish folk song about hopeless love on the high Anatolian steppe.
Welcome to the grand finale of this year's International Turkish Olympiad, the annual 10-day extravaganza of Turkey's most powerful Muslim group, the Fethullah Gulen Movement.
The Olympiads have come a long way the well-known Turkish comedian who is hosting the evening tells the audience, as the giant screens show a time-lapse segment of a fern growing. "In the first year, we had 62 children from 17 countries, in the second, 120 from 24," Kadir Copdemir says. "This year," he pauses for effect, "750 from 120 countries."
The audience cheers, with good reason. It is donations from ordinary people like them, the men with their neat, conservative moustaches and the women in bright floral headscarves, that have helped set up the hundreds of schools that the Movement has opened across the world during the past 15 years.
The children on stage, the Central Asians in richly embroidered felt, the Bangladeshis in batik, the Americans in cowboy hats and folkloric denim, all of them singing Turkish songs, reciting Islamic-tinged Turkish poetry and dancing traditional Turkish dances, are in a way their children, the result of their devotion to the cause.
"The Olympiads are a showcase, and a very efficient one too," says Mazhar Bagli, a sociologist. "It is all very well for a group, any group, to open a school in Almaty [in Kazakhstan]. Almaty is a long way away. You need to see the effects with your own eyes. Otherwise the group's unity and sense of drive disappears."
Other analysts say the organizers of the Olympiads have a second target audience in mind alongside the estimated 2 million to 4 million members of the movement: the Turkish state itself.
Named after Fethullah Gulen, a former state-employed imam based in the United States since 1998, the movement has always preached a moderate, un-rebellious version of Islam that has convinced more feisty Turkish Islamists that it is a patsy of the Turkish state, if not Washington.
Its schools teach a syllabus that is resolutely secular, even if the teachers - all movement members - are ardently pious. Fethullah Gulen supported the Turkish army's two last interventions, the second against an Islamist government in 1997. And yet some secularists remain deeply suspicious of the movement, convinced that it has a long-term strategy of infiltrating traditional secular strongholds like the army and the judiciary.
In a public speech he gave last April, Turkish Chief of Staff Gen. Ilker Basbug warned, in a clear reference to the movement, that the army "cannot remain inactive in the face of the assaults of religious communities."
Charged with anti-secular activities in 2001 (a Turkish court acquitted him last year), Fethullah Gulen cited the establishment of the international schools as part of his defense. "How could anybody not be pleased to see our national anthem being recited tens of thousands of kilometers away," he asked the prosecutor. "How could anybody be upset that our national culture is being taught [abroad]?"
The Olympiads enable Gulen's followers to take his argument to its logical extreme. Every summer, still kitted out in their folkloric gear, bands of Olympian children pay personal visits to various officials, bureaucrats and opinion-shapers. One of those they visited this year was Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, the chief prosecutor who opened a closure case against the Justice and Development (AKP) government in 2008 for allegedly anti-secular activities. Asked by reporters what he made of his Ankara office being transformed briefly into a dance hall for nine foreign children, he responded with lawyerly crispness: "magnificent," he said.
To an outsider, the tactic seems heavy-handed to the extreme. In Turkey, it appears to go down very well: among public figures at least - newspaper editors of all ideological stripes, leading businessmen and politicians - open criticism of the Olympiads, and by extension the movement’s schools, is practically on-existent.
"This organization will transform Turkey from a regional power to a world state," enthused Ali Agaoglu, the CEO of one of Turkey's biggest construction companies.
Known to be no great fan of the movement, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan even offered unstinting praise recently. "These days, when I go abroad, I see our flag flying not just in our embassies," he told the audience at the Istanbul gala night, where he had been invited to make a speech. "I see it in the schools too, and that makes me proud."
Shortly afterwards, his wife began sobbing into her handkerchief as an Afghan girl recited a poem, "My Mother," written by one of the movement's teachers. "The love of the Lord is in my veins / the world burns, mother, the world, do you understand," the Afghan said, her voice cracking repeatedly. "I have to go, I have to go, mother, do you understand? / Let me kiss you, and let the road to heaven start from under your feet."
The melodramatic tone is too much for Kursat Bumin, a philosopher and liberal who writes columns for the Islamic-minded (but Gulen-neutral) daily Yeni Safak. "These children have only been away from home for a week, for God's sake, and they are flying Turkish Airlines," he says. "What are they being made to recite poems about homesickness and death in a foreign field for? It is ridiculous, pathological."
A year ago, Bumin received scores of angry mails from readers after he criticized Olympiad organizers for making two little Congolese girls recite the Turkish national anthem on stage, a jingoistic gesture met with swoons of pleasure by much of the Turkish press.
This year, as is the way with official events in Turkey, the gala began with a minute of silence to commemorate Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk, followed by the audience singing the national anthem. But it got no second rendition. And while the official rhetoric about Turkish being "a language of love" was still very much in evidence, the gala, for the first time in its eight-year history, even featured two non-Turkish acts - Georgian and Moldavian children dancing their native dances.
Nicolas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the Middle East.
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