Tuesday,August 2, 2016,
MURAT YETKİN
murat.yetkin@hurriyet.com.tr
Gülen and the claim of ‘moderate’ Islam
“At a time when Western democracies are searching for moderate Muslim voices, I and my friends in the Hizmet [Service] movement have taken a clear stance against extremist violence, from the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaeda to brutal executions by the Islamic State [of Iraq and the Levant - ISIL] to the kidnappings by Boko Haram.”
The quotation is from Fethullah Gülen’s article published by The New York Times on July 25, 10 days after the bloody coup attempt in Turkey, which the Turkish government accused him of masterminding. For that reason, Gülen says, the U.S. administration should resist the demand of the Turkish government to send him back to be tried. “Mr. [President Tayyip] Erdogan’s accusation is no surprise” Gülen said in the column, “Not for what it says about me but rather for what it reveals about his systematic and dangerous drive toward one-man rule.”
Gülen is an Islamist preacher who has been living in the U.S. for around 20 years. He runs a network of English language schools in Turkey, the U.S. and many other countries around the world. Gülen used to be a close ally of Erdoğan and through his network of police officers, prosecutors, judges and other civil servants he was carefully cultivating the Turkish state apparatus for the success of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) rule, especially in rooting out the secular, modernist civil servants from the security, judicial and education system. Their roads started to part when pro-Gülen prosecutors wanted to interrogate Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkish intelligence, in early 2012 because of his contacts with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which paved the way to dialogue starting later that year and continued for three bloodless years. The ties broke when corruption probes were opened against Erdoğan’s ministers, party executives and family members in late 2013. Since then Erdoğan and the government have denounced the Gülenist network as the “Fethullahist Terror Organization” (FETÖ). The widespread belief in Ankara is that the Gülenists who have been covertly organized in the ranks for the last three decades were alerted that some 600 of them could be revealed and sacked from the military in the Supreme Military Council (YAŞ) meeting later in July, so they attempted the coup on July 15, a bit prematurely.
