Powerful Turkish preacher and religious scholar Fethullah Gülen died Sunday night in the United States, where he had resided since 1999 after being repeatedly persecuted by Turkish authorities for his leadership of a religious movement bringing together thousands of faithful spread across the country.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been his ally for years and both have collaborated on each other’s growth and expansion. However, this alliance ended up publicly breaking up in 2013 due to internal power struggles and the authoritarian drift of the current Turkish president. Erdogan has made him his number one enemy and accuses him of orchestrating and planning the 2016 coup attempt. Despite extradition requests, the United States has never extradited Gülen to Turkey.
In 1995, a large part of Turkey followed live on television the wedding of the greatest footballer of all time, Hakan Şükür. On one side, the popular mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who serves as master of ceremonies. On the other, the best man at the wedding, Fethullah Gülen, a bald man with a round face, wearing glasses and a slightly greenish suit with a tie.
Deeply pious, Şükür, Erdogan and Gülen represent a sector of society traditionally despised by the elites of a system guaranteed by the force of the army, which had already succeeded in three coups d’état (1960, 1971 and 1980).
Gülen and Erdogan feel victims of the system and want to restore it. Gülen was born in 1938, the year of Atatürk’s death, and his life, like Erdogan’s, was marked from the beginning by strict Kemalist secularism. When his father, Ramiz, who was also an imam, went to the registry to register his son’s birth, the official said the chosen name, Muhammed Fethullah, was too Islamic. Ramiz didn’t fight and turned around. He left and did not return until three years later, when his other son was born. On this occasion, the official listed Gülen only as Fethullah, omitting Muhammad. That’s why the preacher’s official date of birth is April 27, 1941, three years after the actual date, according to an amiable biography that surrounds his life with legend and mystery.
Erdogan’s youth was also marked by this Kemalist secularism. The future president studied in a religious school whose students often denounced discrimination. Erdogan remembers being told repeatedly that his only career would be cleaning up the bodies of the dead. Students from these religious schools were even barred from entering university, except to study theology.
When Erdogan – who became prime minister and then president – managed to defeat this secular elite who, for decades, had succeeded in crushing the rise of political Islam, the definitive break between the politician and the religious scholar occurred. Many analysts criticize the fact that the Gülenists themselves collaborated and played a fundamental role in this battle alongside Erdogan, in which the judicial structures were even ready to put an end to the Turkish military leadership and its opponents of all sides.
For the preacher’s followers, Gülenism is a civic, educational and cultural movement inspired by Islamic interpretations of its reference and organized as a decentralized network of individuals who launch projects independent of each other and who devote part of their income to initiatives. . of the movement, focused above all on education.
Outside of Turkey, in addition to educational centers and certain businesses, Gülenists are creating institutions in which everything revolves around intercultural and interreligious dialogue. The preacher’s followers publicly promote education and dialogue between cultures as a solution to all the planet’s problems, including poverty and conflict.
Gülen’s goal was to remove religion from Turkey’s traditional mosques and institutions and adapt it to the modern world and to ensure that the preacher’s conservative teachings, values and principles permeated the entire social structure. Therefore his movement attempts to link religion with the study and knowledge of science and also supports the market economy and business projects of its followers as representatives of a successful Islam and in the air of the times.
According to Erdogan, however, his former ally leads a perfectly organized terrorist network whose members seek to seize power by infiltrating powerful state institutions and, for this, education and money are key elements.
Media and analysts have highlighted the presence of Gülenists within the judiciary, the police and even the army. Confidential US diplomatic cables at the time said it could not be confirmed whether police were actually controlled by Gulenists, but they found no one to question that claim, the former US ambassador said in Turkey, James Jeffrey.
A few weeks after his arrival in the United States in 1999, a recording was discovered which still haunts the preacher today and which, according to his enemies, is proof of the existence of this hidden agenda. Sitting relaxed on an armchair, without looking at the camera and with his weight resting on his left arm, Gülen conveys to his supporters the importance of accessing positions of power in the state: “You must move through the arteries of the system without anyone noticing. “Your existence until you reach all the centers of power… You must wait for the moment when you have all the state power; until you have on your side all the power of the institution Constitutional Law of Turkey.”
Gülen then denounced the fact that the published fragments had been carefully chosen and cut to manipulate the public and take his remarks out of context. The religious leader assured that he was responding to questions about alleged favoritism towards certain interest groups and mafias in many positions in the state bureaucracy.
Since the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has launched purge after purge to expel Fethullah Gülen’s supporters from public institutions, in addition to closing all his institutions in Turkey and attempting the same abroad. Less than ten days after the coup, Turkey had already arrested ten thousand people.
The Gülenists did participate in the coup attempt and, according to Metin Gurcan, a former soldier turned defense analyst, they were the most prepared and powerful group within the operation. However, so far, Erdogan has failed to convince his European and American partners of the participation of Fethullah Gülen as the mastermind of the operation.
As the EU intelligence center INTCEN concluded, “the decision to launch the coup was born out of fear of a purge. “It is likely that a group of soldiers composed of Gülenists, Kemalists, AKP opponents and opportunists was behind the coup. » European analysts went further, stating that it was unlikely that Gülen himself played a role in the attack.
This crackdown on the Gülen movement has often violated the rule of law and human rights and has even resulted in international kidnappings orchestrated by Turkey’s intelligence agency, MIT.
Mehmet Siginir, a disciple of the preacher living in Spain and who had to flee Turkey, is convinced that from now on everything “will be better”. “Hizmet is a set of voluntary principles, it is entirely decentralized and integrated according to local conditions and those of the time. His supporters will surely overcome these sad and difficult days and continue working on their projects,” he told elDiario.es.
