Erdogan’s number one enemy Fethullah Gulen dies in Turkey

Powerful Turkish preacher and religious scholar Fethullah Gulen died on the night of Sunday to Monday in the United States, where he had lived since 1999 after being persecuted on several occasions by Turkish authorities for leading a religious movement of thousands of followers. . All over the country.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was his ally for years and both supported each other’s development and expansion. However, that alliance publicly broke down 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 accused him of plotting and planning the 2016 coup. Despite extradition requests, the US never extradited Gulen to Turkey.

In 1995, the wedding of Hakan Sukur, the greatest footballer of all time, was broadcast live on television by most of Turkey. On one side is Istanbul’s popular mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who serves as master of ceremonies. On the other hand, the wedding witness, Fethullah Gülen, is a bald man with a round face, wearing glasses and a light green suit with a tie.

Extremely devout, Đukur, Erdoğan and Gülen represent a sector of society traditionally despised by the elite of a system guaranteed by military force, which by then had successfully carried out three coups (1960, 1971 and 1980) Was.

Gülen and Erdogan feel 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 his early days. When his father, Ramiz, who was also an imam, went to the registry to register his son’s birth, the relevant official said that the name chosen, Muhammad Fethullah, was too Islamic. Ramiz did not fight and turned away. He left and did not return until three years later, when his second son was born. On this occasion, the officer named Gülen only as Fethullah, leaving out Muhammad. That’s why the preacher’s official date of birth is April 27, 1941, which is three years later than the actual date, according to a pitiful biography that shrouds his life in legends and mysteries.

Erdogan’s youth was also marked by this Kemalist secularism. The future president studied at a religious school, whose students often complained of discrimination. Erdogan remembers how they told him repeatedly that his only career path would be cleaning the bodies of the dead. Students from these religious schools were banned from university except from studying theology.

When Erdogan – who became prime minister and later president – ​​managed to defeat the secular elite that had managed to suppress the rise of political Islam for decades, there came a definitive separation between politician and religious scholar. Many analysts criticize that the Gülenists themselves collaborated and played a fundamental role in the conflict with Erdoğan in which the Turkish military leadership and judicial systems were also designed to eliminate all forms of opposition.

For the preacher’s followers, Gülenism is a civic, educational and cultural movement inspired by Islamic interpretations of its context and organized into a decentralized network of individuals who undertake projects independent of each other and who contribute a portion of their income. Dedicate to initiative. The main focus of the movement was on education.

Outside Türkiye, in addition to educational centers and some companies, Gülenists set up 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 of the planet’s problems, especially poverty and conflicts.

Gülen’s goal was to adapt the religion to the modern world by removing it from Turkey’s mosques and traditional institutions and to permeate the preacher’s conservative teachings, values, and principles throughout the social structure. That is why his movement strives 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 in line with the times.

However, according to Erdogan, his former colleague leads a fully organized terrorist network, whose members want to seize power by infiltrating powerful state institutions and for this education and money are the key elements.

Media and analysts have highlighted the presence of Gülenists within the judiciary, police, and even the military. Confidential US diplomatic cables at the time said it was impossible to confirm whether the police were actually controlled by Gülenists, but they found no one to question that claim, said James Jeffrey, the former US ambassador to Turkey.

A few weeks after he landed in the United States in 1999, a recording surfaced that has haunted the preacher to this day and, according to his enemies, is proof of the existence of that hidden agenda. Sitting comfortably in a chair, without looking at the camera and resting his weight on his left arm, Gülen conveys to his followers the importance of reaching positions of power in the state: “You have to take over the system without anyone knowing. You must proceed in the veins of your existence until you reach all the centers of power… You must wait until you have all the state power in Turkey; Do not use all the power in your favor.

Gülen then denounced that the published excerpts were carefully selected and cut to influence the public and that his words were taken out of context. The religious leader assured that he was answering questions about alleged favoritism to certain interest groups and mafias in several jobs in the state bureaucracy.

Since the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has carried out a purge campaign expelling Fethullah Gülen’s followers from public institutions, in addition to closing all of his institutions in Turkey and attempting the same abroad. Less than ten days after the coup, Turkiye had already detained ten thousand people.

Gülenists took part in the coup attempt and, according to Metin Gürkan, a former soldier turned defense analyst, they constituted the most prepared and most powerful group within the operation. However, to date Erdogan has not managed to convince his European and American allies of Fethullah Gülen’s involvement as the mastermind of the operation.

As the EU’s intelligence centre, INTCEN, has 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 were behind the coup.” European analysts went a step further and said it was unlikely that Gulen himself played a role in the attack.

This repression campaign against the Gülen movement has often violated the rule of law and human rights and has also included international kidnappings organized by the Turkish intelligence agency, MIT.

Mehmet Signir, a follower of the preacher living in Spain and who had to flee Turkey, is confident that everything will “get better” from now on. “Hizmet is a set of voluntary principles, it is completely decentralized and integrated according to local conditions and time. Surely his followers will overcome these sad and difficult days and continue working on their projects,” he told elDiario.es.