The powerful Turkish preacher and religious scholar Fethullah Gülen died on the night of Sunday to Monday in the United States, where he had resided since 1999 after being persecuted on several occasions by the Turkish authorities for his leadership of a religious movement of thousands of followers spread across the country. all over the world.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was his ally for years and both collaborated in each other’s growth and expansion. However, that alliance ended up publicly breaking up in 2013 due to internal power struggles and the authoritarian drift of the current Turkish president. Erdogan had made him his number one enemy and accuses him of orchestrating and planning the 2016 coup attempt. Despite extradition requests, the US never extradited Gülen to Turkey.
In 1995, much of Türkiye followed the marriage of the until then greatest footballer of all time, Hakan Şükür, live on television. On one side is the popular mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who acts as master of ceremonies. On the other, the wedding witness, Fethullah Gülen, a balding man with a round face, wearing glasses and a light greenish suit with a tie.
Deeply devout, 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 by then had already successfully completed three coups d’état (1960, 1971 and 1980).
Gülen and Erdogan feel like victims of the system and want to reestablish it. Gülen was born in 1938, the year of Atatürk’s death, and his life, like Erdogan’s, was marked by strict Kemalist secularism from its earliest days. When his father, Ramiz, who was also an imam, went to the registry to register the birth of his son, the official in question said that the chosen name, Muhammed Fethullah, was too Islamic. Ramiz did not 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 enrolled Gülen only as Fethullah, omitting Muhammad. That is why the official date of birth of the preacher is April 27, 1941, three years after the actual date, according to a kind biography that shrouds his life in legend and mystery.
Erdogan’s youth was also marked by this Kemalist secularism. The future president studied at a religious school whose students often reported discrimination. Erdogan remembers how they told him time and time again that his only career path would be to clean the bodies of the dead. Students from these religious schools were even banned from university except to study Theology.
When Erdogan—who became prime minister and later president—managed to defeat that secular elite that for decades had managed to crush the rise of political Islam, the definitive break between the politician and the religious scholar came. Many analysts criticize that the Gülenists themselves collaborated and adopted a fundamental role in that battle together with Erdogan in which judicial setups were even prepared to put an end to the Turkish military leadership and opponents of all kinds.
For the followers of the preacher, Gülenism is a civic, educational and cultural movement inspired by the Islamic interpretations of its reference and organized in a decentralized network of individuals who initiate projects independent of each other and who dedicate a part of their income to the initiatives of the movement, focused above all on education.
Outside Türkiye, in addition to educational centers and some companies, Gülenists establish institutions in which everything revolves around intercultural and interfaith dialogue. The preacher’s followers publicly promote education and dialogue between cultures as a solution to all the planet’s problems, especially poverty and conflicts.
Gülen’s goal was to remove religion from the mosques and traditional institutions of Turkey to adapt it to the modern world and for the preacher’s conservative teachings, values and principles to permeate the entire social structure. That is why his movement tries to link religion with the study and knowledge of science and also supports the market economy and the business projects of its followers as representatives of a successful Islam in keeping with 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.
The media and analysts have highlighted the presence of Gülenists within the judiciary, the police and even the Army. Confidential US diplomatic cables said at the time that it was impossible to confirm whether the police were indeed controlled by the Gülenists, but that they had not found anyone to question that claim, said former US ambassador to Turkey, James Jeffrey.
A few weeks after landing in the United States in 1999, a recording came to light that has haunted the preacher to this day and that, according to his enemies, is proof of the existence of that 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 followers the importance of reaching positions of power in the State: “You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing.” your existence until you reach all the centers of power… You must wait until the moment you have all the state power; until you have on your side all the power of the constitutional institution in Türkiye.”
Gülen then denounced that the published fragments were carefully chosen and cut to manipulate the public and take his words out of context. The religious leader assured that he was responding to questions about alleged favoritism for certain interest groups and mafias in many jobs in the state bureaucracy.
Since the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has launched purge after purge to expel followers of Fethullah Gülen from public institutions, in addition to closing all of his institutions in Turkey and attempting the same abroad. In less than ten days since the coup, Türkiye had already detained ten thousand people.
Gülenists did participate in the coup attempt and, according to Metin Gurcan, a former soldier turned defense analyst, they constituted the most prepared and most powerful group within the operation. However, to this day Erdogan has not managed to convince his European and American partners about the participation of Fethullah Gülen as the mastermind of the operation.
As concluded by the EU intelligence center, INTCEN, “the decision to launch the coup was born from fear of a purge. “It is likely that a group of soldiers composed of Gülenists, Kemalists, AKP opponents and opportunists were behind the coup.” European analysts went a step further by stating that it was unlikely that Gülen himself had played a role in the attack.
This repression operation against the Gülen Movement has often violated the rule of law and human rights and has even included international kidnappings orchestrated by the Turkish intelligence agency, MIT.
Mehmet Siginir, a follower of the preacher living in Spain who had to flee Turkey, is confident that everything “will get better” from now on. “Hizmet is a set of voluntary principles, it is fully decentralized and integrated according to local conditions and those of the time. Surely his followers will overcome these sad and hard days and will continue working on their projects,” he tells elDiario.es.
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