Exiled cleric accused of coup plot against President Erdogan of Turkey

Fethullah Gulen, the preacher who founded an international Islamic movement and was a major ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, before being accused of plotting a coup against him in 2016, has died. He was 83.

Gulen died late on Sunday in a hospital in the United States, where he had lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, according to the social media accounts of Herkul, a website associated with his movement.

Turkish Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen who the Turkish government alleged masterminded a failed 2016 coup attempt.Credit: AP

During his rise as an Islamist politician in a staunchly secular country, Erdogan found useful allies in Gulen’s followers, who also used Islam as their guide in the prominent positions they held in Turkey’s judiciary, police forces and news media. But the two men later became enemies, and in 2016 the Turkish government designated Gulen’s movement a terrorist organisation.

Nearly a decade after the failed coup and more than two decades since he left Turkey for the United States, Gulen’s image still loomed large as a key irritant in US-Turkey relations and for Erdogan, who wanted the cleric sent back to Turkey to stand trial.

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on Monday confirmed Gulen’s death, calling him the leader of a “dark organisation.” Suggesting that Gulen’s movement still posed a threat to Turkey, Fidan urged its followers to cut ties.

“With this death, the spell on them should be removed,” he said.

Gulen began his career as a provincial preacher in Turkey but gradually amassed a large following that grew into an international movement called Hizmet, or “service,” in Turkish. At its height, Hizmet ran schools in Turkey, Central Asia, Africa and elsewhere, and promoted a vision of Islam that was friendly to the West and supported free markets, science and interfaith dialogue.

People pass by an effigy of Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Muslim cleric, with Turkish words that read: “the traitor, FETO” (Gulen’s nickname) in Ankara, Turkey, 2016.Credit: AP

“Our general philosophy is to open up to all of humanity with love, while one of our feet is in our own world of thought,” Gulen said in a 2014 interview with BBC Turkish.

But Gulen’s many detractors accused his movement of covertly working toward a more sinister goal: infiltrating the Turkish government to eventually take over.

For Erdogan, Gulen’s followers, known as Gulenists, were initially valuable partners. For more than a decade, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party embraced them, angering Turks who said the two Islamist groups were working together to increase the role of Islam in public life.

But that relationship began to break down, taking a significant hit in 2013 when Turkish prosecutors investigated government officials close to Erdogan, then the prime minister, for corruption. Erdogan said the investigations had been concocted by a “criminal gang” with foreign links – a clear reference to the Gulenists – and dismissed dozens of officials involved in them, including the Istanbul police chief.

The alliance collapsed after the 2016 coup attempt, when parts of the Turkish military using tanks and fighter jets attacked government institutions, bombed the parliament building in Ankara and attempted to kidnap Erdogan. About 250 people had been killed by the time the Turkish government quashed the rebellion, which took only a matter of hours.

Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul’s Taksim square on July 16, 2016.Credit: AP

Erdogan blamed Gulen for plotting the failed coup and began a vast purge in its aftermath, imposing a state of emergency for two years, detaining 100,000 people and removing 150,000 public employees from their jobs. More than 8000 military personnel were prosecuted on charges of complicity in the insurrection.

The crackdown shuttered Gulenist schools, news outlets and businesses in Turkey and effectively destroyed the movement as an overt force in Turkish society and politics. Many of its prominent figures ended up in exile.

Gulen repeatedly denied that his group had anything to do with the attempted coup, and rarely travelled far from his rural retreat in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. That fuelled accusations from Erdogan and other Turkish officials that the preacher was an American asset who had been deployed to weaken Turkey.

“The coup plotter is in your country,” Erdogan said in 2016, addressing the United States. “You are nurturing him there. It’s out in the open.”

The Turkish government cancelled Gulen’s Turkish passport in 2015 and tried for years to have the cleric extradited, but the United States never agreed to send him back to Turkey.

In a guest essay published in The New York Times in 2016, Gulen said that he had always taught “inclusive and pluralist Islam,” promoted democracy, and opposed armed rebellion.

He said Erdogan’s accusations against him revealed the Turkish leader’s “systematic and dangerous drive toward one-man rule.”

Much about Gulen’s life and the movement he founded floats in the cloudy realm between the hagiography of his followers and the sweeping but mostly unproven accusations of vast conspiracies levelled by his Turkish detractors.

According to his official biography, Gulen was born in the village of Korucuk near the city of Erzurum in northeastern Turkey. He had eight siblings; his father was a local imam, or prayer leader; and his mother taught him the Koran.

He dropped out of elementary school to study Islam and the Arabic language, eventually joining the Turkish civil service as a mosque functionary. He decided not to marry so he could, he said, “devote myself to Islamic services.”

His prominence took off in the 1970s. He preached in important mosques around Turkey and travelled internationally, meeting with American Jewish leaders and Pope John Paul II to promote understanding among the Abrahamic faiths. His followers opened subsidised dormitories for poor students in Turkey to expand his movement and schools abroad to spread his message internationally.

The Turkish authorities repeatedly pursued him for religious activities deemed threatening to Turkey’s official state secularism, and in 1999, he moved to the United States. A recording of a sermon he had given circulated around that time in which he told his followers to “move within the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centres.”

His followers dismissed the tape as a manipulation, but other Turks saw it as confirmation that the Gulenists were a power-hungry cult seeking to take control of the government.

Fethullah Gulen, whom the Turkish government accuses of masterminding a coup, has his blood pressure checked at his compound in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.Credit: New York Times

In 2002, Gulen applied for permanent residency in the United States but was rejected. He later received it after providing endorsement letters from a former CIA official and a former US ambassador to Turkey, fuelling Turkish suspicions that he was a key node in an international plot.

In Turkey, his followers remained influential, running a newspaper, a television station and a bank and working in the police forces and judiciary. Their support was critical to Erdogan after he first became prime minister in 2003 and needed institutional backing to challenge Turkey’s traditional secular and military elites.

But Erdogan brought the full force of the Turkish state to bear on the movement after the 2016 coup attempt, expunging it from public life.

Turkish officials continued to lash out at Gulen and at the American officials who refused to return him to Turkey, questioning how a NATO ally could deprive Turkey of a man it considered a dangerous terrorist.

“Whatever Osama bin Laden means for the United States and for the American people, Fethullah Gulen means the same for Turkey and Turkish people,” Bekir Bozdag, Erdogan’s justice minister, said in 2016.

The New York Times

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