Fethullah
Gulen
Believers say he preaches a new,
modern form of Islam. Critics charge he is a power hungry wolf in sheep’s
clothing preparing to convert secular Turkey into an Islamic republic; a
conspirator who has created a state within the state and attempted this weekend
to topple democratically elected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a
failed military coup.
That was not how past Turkish
governments or for that matter Mr. Erdogan in his first eight years as prime
minister saw Fethullalh Gulen, the leader of one of the world’s largest and
wealthiest Islamic movements.
Back in the 1990s, secular prime
ministers Tansu Ciller and Mesut Yilmaz and other prominent political leaders
viewed Mr. Gulen as their weapon against the pro-Islamic Refah (Welfare) Party,
the predecessor of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), that
advocated Turkey’s divorce from the West and a return to its Islamic and
Ottoman roots.
Mr. Erdogan too initially saw Mr.
Gulen as a cherished ally. The two men worked together to force the staunchly
secular military in line with one of the European Union’s demands for future
Turkish membership to accept civilian control. It fit both men’s goal of
lifting French-style laicist restrictions on freedom of religious expression
that had long been resisted by the military. Mr. Erdogan had at the time no
problem with Mr. Gulen’s followers establishing a power base in the police
force and the military.
This weekend’s failed coup suggests
that elements of the military still believe in a non-constitutional role of the
military. Yet, at the same time, it is to the credit of Messrs. Erdogan and
Gulen, that significant parts of the military, the opposition and the public
backed Turkey’s democratically elected president and helped foil the coup
irrespective of what they thought of his politics and leadership.
Mr. Gulen’s moves into branches of
government, a version of German student leader Rudi Dutschke’s march through
the institutions, reflected his long-term strategy. Mr. Gulen preaches
obedience to the state and recognition of the rule of law while at the same
time inserting his followers into key institutions of the state and educating a
next generation in his ideological mold.
Indeed, more than half a century
after he first became a government employed imam, Mr. Gulen adopted the role.
He often dresses in a crumpled sports jacket and slacks, looking the part of a
modern religious leader rather than a fervent Turkish nationalist or a militant
Islamist. A doleful 75-year-old, he moreover talks the talk, evading language
often employed by Turkey’s right-wing nationalists and Islamists.
As a result, Mr. Gulen’s modernist
approach appealed to urban conservatives and some more liberal segments of the
middle class. His approach contrasted starkly with that of Mr. Erdogan, who
targeted the more rural conservatives and the nationalists.
It was indeed Mr. Gulen’s advocacy
of tolerance, dialogue and worldly education as well as his endorsement of
Turkey’s close ties to Europe that endeared him to the country’s secular
leaders of the 1990s and subsequently to Mr. Erdogan.
“We can build confidence and peace
in this country if we treat each other with tolerance,” Mr. Gulen said in a
first and since then rare interview at the time with a foreign correspondent.
“There’s no place for quarreling in this world… By emphasizing our support for
education and the media, we can prove that Islam is open to contemporary
things,” he added sprinkling his slow and deliberate speech with old Ottoman
Turkish words regarded as quaint by modern Turks.
A diabetic with a heart ailment, Mr.
Gulen has devoted himself since officially retiring in the early 1990s to
writing tracts on Islam. Yet there is little in his writing or the
administration of institutions linked to him that points in the direction of
theological renewal.
Mr. Gulen among other things takes a
conservative view of the role of women and has said that the presence of women
makes him uncomfortable. It was something he had felt since he was a young man,
he said. Not surprisingly, Mr. Gulen’s movement operates separate schools for
boys and girls.
Yet, even Mr. Gulen has evolved.
When in the mid-1990s a woman visitor asked directions to a toilet at the
Istanbul headquarters of his Zaman newspaper, officials said the multi-story
building wasn’t equipped for women visitors. A member of the staff was sent to
check whether a men’s room was free. That has changed and women’s toilets were
installed long before Mr. Erdogan sent his police in March of this year to take
over the paper.
Critics charge that Mr. Gulen
professed moderation may not be what he really hopes to achieve. “Fethullah’s
main project is the takeover of the state. That is why he was investing in
education. They believe the state will just fall into their lap because they
will be ready for it, they will have the people in place. That is their
long-term plan,” said a prominent liberal Turkish intellectual.
Indeed, Mr. Gulen’s movement,
despite the imam’s long-term vision, effectively sought to undermine Mr.
Erdogan’s government in late 2013 with charges of corruption against ministers
in the then prime minister’s cabinet and members of his family. The charges and
alleged evidence to back them up were never tested in a court of law.
Mr. Erdogan made sure of that. For
him, the charges were the straw that broke the camel’s back. What had been an
increasingly public parting of the ways that started with a soccer match fixing
scandal in 2011 turned in late 2013 into open warfare with Mr. Erdogan firing
or moving thousands of judiciary personnel and police officers to other jobs,
shutting down the investigation, and seeking to destroy Mr. Gulen’s religious,
educational and commercial empire.
The fact that the police played a
key role in foiling this weekend’s coup attempt bears testimony to the degree
to which Mr. Erdogan has succeeded in erasing Mr. Gulen’s influence in the
police. This weekend’s dismissal of almost 3,000 judges and the issuance of
arrest warrants for 140 of them on allegations of involvement with Mr. Gulen
suggests that Mr. Erdogan believes that his efforts to destroy the imam’s
infrastructure were more successful in the police than they were in the
judiciary.
None of this amounts to evidence of
Mr. Erdogan’s assertion that Mr. Gulen engineered this weekend’s coup attempt.
Like so much in recent years, Mr. Erdogan has used the alleged threat of a
state within a state as well as increasingly authoritarian measures to remove
his critics from the media and academia and to attempt to cow the parliamentary
opposition to turn Turkey into an a more authoritarian state.
Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly illiberal
version of Turkish democracy in which the public is invited to protest on his
behalf but not against him makes uttering unsubstantiated allegations
relatively easy. Mr. Erdogan will however have to produce hard evidence if he
formally goes ahead with a request that the United States extradite Mr. Gulen,
who is a green card holder resident in Pennsylvania.
Even if those that staged the failed
coup turn out to be followers of Mr. Gulen, Mr. Erdogan would still have to
prove that Mr. Gulen was aware and involved in their plans. That may be easier
said than done.
Back in 2011, during the soccer
match fixing scandal, the first public indication of the growing rift between
the two Islamists, Mr. Gulen apologized to one of the involved club executives.
The preacher said if his followers were involved in prosecuting soccer
executives and players, he was not aware of that. It was a rare suggestion that
Mr. Gulen, a by now frail old man, may no longer be in control of the empire he
built.
James M. Dorsey
James M. Dorsey is a senior
fellow at Nanyang
Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
in Singapore and the author of the blog, The
Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
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