Throughout Eurasia, an Islamist social movement is helping Central Asians transition from their communist experience by building schools, offering English-language courses for adults, and consciously supporting a freer public sphere. It is because of both the extreme local conditions and the continuous success of the Turkish schools that Turkmenistan provides an edifying case study of the Gulen movement's contributions to postsocialist transformations of Central Asian societies. This paper argues that Turkish schools have flourished because the community preserves a modern, secular curriculum, while engaging rather than threatening the state. (Contains 7 notes.)