The bloody coup attempt in Turkey last week, which cost more than 200 lives, brought the world’s attention to the group that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared responsible: the Islamic community led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since the late 1990s.
Mr.
Gulen strongly denies the charges. Some in the West seem to think that
this is yet another of the many bizarre conspiracy theories peddled by
Mr. Erdogan. But this is not merely propaganda. There are good reasons
to believe the accusation is correct.
The Gulen
community is built around one man: Fethullah Gulen. His followers see
him not merely as a learned cleric, as they publicly claim, but the
“awaited one,” as I have been told in private. He is the Mahdi, the
Islamic version of the Messiah, who will save the Muslim world, and
ultimately the world itself. Many of his followers also believe that Mr.
Gulen sees the Prophet Muhammad in his dreams and receives orders from
him.
Besides Mr. Gulen’s unquestionable authority,
another key feature of the movement is its cultish hierarchy. The Gulen
movement is structured like a pyramid: Top-level imams give orders to
second-level imams, who give orders to third-level imams, and it goes on
like that to the grass roots.
What
does the group do? Its most visible activities include opening schools,
running charities that provide social services to the poor and
maintaining “dialogue centers” that preach love, tolerance and peace.
There is nothing wrong with that, of course. I personally have spoken
many times at Gulen institutions as a guest, and met modest, kind,
lovable people.
But, as one disillusioned Gulenist
told me last year, “there is a darker side of the movement, and few of
its members know it as it is.” For decades, the movement has been
infiltrating Turkey’s state institutions, like the police, judiciary and
military. Many believe that some Gulenists, taking orders from their
imams, hide their identities and try to rise through these institutions
in order to capture state power.
When
Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P.,
came to power in 2002, they felt threatened by the hard-core secularists
who have dominated Turkey’s military since the days of Ataturk, the
father of the Turkish republic. Mr. Erdogan viewed the Gulenist cadres
in the state as an asset, and an alliance was born. The Erdogan
government supported Gulenist police officers, prosecutors and judges as
they went after secularists. Starting in 2007, hundreds of secularist
officers and their civilian allies were jailed.
This
witch hunt was driven by Mr. Erdogan’s political agenda, but the
Gulenists were even more aggressive than the A.K.P. More worrying: Some
of the evidence turned out to be overblown. Two secular journalists and a
police chief who exposed the fake evidence, and blamed the “The Imam’s Army,” were soon themselves imprisoned on bogus charges.
“How
can they justify using fake evidence to blame innocent people?” I once
asked my disillusioned Gulenist friend. “Since their end goal is so
great,” he said, referring to the movement’s global, apocalyptic
ambition, “they think all means are justified.”
It
eventually became clear why the Gulenists had been so fervent in their
persecution of the secularists: They wanted to replace them. Many of the
officers who reportedly took part in last week’s coup attempt had been
promoted thanks to a major purge of the military in 2009 that supposedly
saved Mr. Erdogan from a coup.
By 2012, the old
secularist guard had been quelled and the Gulenists and the A.K.P. were
left more or less alone to run Turkey. It took less than two years
before the two Islamist groups developed distrust and, ultimately,
enmity. This tension came to a head in December 2013, when Gulenist
police officers and prosecutors arrested dozens of government officials
in a corruption investigation, most likely in the hope of toppling Mr.
Erdogan, who condemned the inquiry as a “coup attempt.” At the time,
this sounded like a self-serving exaggeration.
But
the bloody plot of July 15 is far more destructive than anything Turkey
has seen in recent years. Notably, the plot came as Mr. Erdogan was
supposed to be planning a major purge of suspected Gulenists from the
military. The military’s chief of staff, who opposed the coup,
identified the rebellious officers as Gulenists. One plotter even
reportedly confessed to acting under orders from the Gulen movement.
Given
the Gulen community’s hierarchical structure, all of this makes Mr.
Gulen a prime suspect. Of course, the truth can come out only in a fair
trial. Unfortunately, Turkey is not good at those — especially given Mr.
Erdogan’s control over the judiciary and the ferocious polarization in
the country today. But the United States government can try to negotiate
with its Turkish counterparts to extradite Mr. Gulen, as Turkey’s
government is now requesting, on the condition of a fair trial.
That
would ensure justice, improve Turkish-American relations and help calm
the dangerous zeal in Turkey. It may even be necessary to help many of
the innocent people in the Gulen community to know what they are really
involved in — and to begin new lives as free individuals.