One of the first images that greets a visitor to Istanbul’s Memory 15 July Museum – an institution commemorating the coup attempt against the Erdoğan regime in the summer of 2016 – is a portrait of a dark figure set against a blood-red background. The elderly man, luridly depicted, requires no introduction. Today, any Turkish speaker is likely to recognize Fethullah Gülen, who died in Pennsylvania at the age of 83 this month. As the leading figure in the country’s Islamic civil society movement, and a prominent ally turned enemy of its ruling party, his impact on the past few decades of Turkish political life is hard to overstate. Yet his legacy remains contested, and obscure to many outsiders.

Gülen was born to a modest family in the mountainous northeastern province of Erzurum. Although his birth date is now accepted as 27 April 1941, apocryphal accounts claimed it was 10 November 1938: the same day that Turkey’s pater patriae Kemal Atatürk died. Gülen’s father was a village imam, and as a child he was steeped in the madrasa-based religious culture of eastern Anatolia and Kurdistan, despite the secularizing directives from Ankara. He came under the sway of the teachings of Said Nursi, a Kurdish theologian from nearby Bitlis who synthesized Sufi principles with modernizing currents in Sunni Islam. Like many easterners of his generation Gülen migrated west as a young man, where he followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming an imam in Edirne and, later, Izmir. His outlook was shaped by the convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s, when a number of competing political visions – communism, social democracy, Islamism, fascism – challenged laicist republicanism for primacy. During that time, Turkey’s nascent Islamist movement experienced repeated political setbacks, which encouraged Gülen to focus on civil society as the domain in which to advance his vision of Muslim piety.

Jailed for a short time after the military coup of 1971, Gülen saw his reputation as a preacher grow steadily, especially after the subsequent coup of 12 September 1980, in which the army once again seized power in an attempt to wipe out the organized left. He established a network of private schools, theological reading circles, businesses, media platforms and civil society organizations, exploiting the state’s new, neoliberal openness to Muslim institutions. Yet this network became embattled after the so-called ‘postmodern’ coup of 1997, when a cadre of Turkey’s generals reacted to the stirrings of political Islamism by forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and dismantling his Welfare Party. For a brief period, they created a political climate of reinvigorated laicism, animated by a nostalgic image of Atatürk. This prompted Gülen to leave for the United States on the pretence of seeking medical treatment. His status as Turkey’s most prominent expatriate worked to his movement’s advantage, allowing him to choreograph a global empire of businesses and NGOs with greater ease from outside his home country.

The 1980s and early 1990s were a crucible for the careers of many ambitious political figures who would have been beyond the pale in previous decades. Among them was a young man from a working-class neighbourhood in Istanbul whose oratorical skills outstripped even his notable talents on the football pitch: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While Gülen organized within civil society, Erdoğan pursued political power, winning the mayoralty of Istanbul in 1994 as a member of the Welfare Party. The coup of 1997 was a temporary obstacle – he was jailed for ten months for reciting a poem that was deemed to be an anti-secular incitement to violence and communal hatred – but by the early 2000s his ascent to the acme of Turkish politics was almost complete. His newly established Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept the parliamentary elections of 2002; Erdoğan has been either Prime Minister or President since.

Throughout the 2000s, Erdoğan and Gülen were the two faces of the ascendant Islamic movement: one at the helm of the government, the other more embedded in Turkish society, albeit as an absentee. At the time, Erdoğan and the AKP styled themselves as a liberalizing Muslim party in the Christian Democratic mould, eager to seize the geopolitical opportunities that accrued to ‘good Muslims’ during the US-led War on Terror. EU membership was a top priority, though this ambition was soon scuppered by western European Islamophobia. Erdoğan announced various liberal ‘openings’ (açılımlar), which he claimed would abolish the obdurate taboos in Turkish politics: reckoning with the Armenian genocide, recognition of Turkey’s Alevi minority, and, above all, respecting the rights of Turkey’s Kurds and ending the civil war in the southeast between the Turkish army and the PKK.

Gülen and his movement – known by affiliates as Hizmet, meaning ‘service’ – were staunch allies of the AKP throughout this period. Their alliance reflected a series of broader demographic and political-economic changes. Both were expressions of a parvenu elite of pious entrepreneurial Muslims, frequently from provincial backgrounds, who opposed what they saw as the outdated orthodoxies of Kemalist state secularism and economic protectionism. The Kemalists, by contrast, saw the AKP and Hizmet as radical Islamists committed to overturning Atatürk’s state. Gülen’s schools, foundations and media outlets spent the early years of the Erdoğan administration promoting an image of Islam as a religion of peace and devoted to interfaith dialogue. They formed part of the vanguard of a nongovernmental politics of Islam in Turkey, which sought legitimacy on the basis of the supposedly ‘nonpolitical’ character of civil society. Gülen’s support for Erdoğan was particularly crucial during the series of trials in the 2000s – the Sledgehammer and Ergenekon cases – which uprooted allegedly putschist elements in the army, and constituted the first meaningful check on the military’s political influence in Republican history. Yet the AKP’s limited concessions to Turkey’s Kurds – which fell far short of any politics of redistribution in the southeast – failed to quell longstanding frustrations over decades of structural violence, discrimination and war. Gülen likewise advocated an ethnicized, resolutely Turkish image of Sunni Islam from which Kurds were largely excluded.

The reasons for the eventual collapse of the relationship between Erdoğan and Gülen – and, beyond that, the rift between Turkey’s Islamist political movement and Muslim civil society – remain opaque. From an ideological perspective it made little sense, since both seemed to be committed to the same transformative project of capitalist Sunni piety with a strong dose of Turkish ethnonationalism. Their dispute was likely a result of competition for control over state institutions. Gülen’s devotees were often accused of forming a ‘parallel’ state which rivalled the official one. As the AKP consolidated its hegemony, the party became increasingly unwilling to tolerate Gülenist loyalties among many bureaucrats and state employees, especially in the police force. The first public signs of the conflict emerged in late 2013, when state prosecutors affiliated with Gülen brought corruption charges against a number of powerful AKP figures, including members of Erdoğan’s family. In response, the AKP ensured that Gülenists were removed from their posts by the thousands.

That was nothing, however, compared to the deluge of dismissals, detentions and arrests that would follow the coup attempt of 15 July 2016. Although the events of that night are well-documented, their causes – in the subterranean networks of power and persuasion – remain poorly understood. There is little doubt that many of the military officers responsible were Gülenists, but the extent to which the coup was a home-grown conspiracy or an international scheme is unclear. The putschists focused on Ankara and Istanbul, as well as the southwestern resort town of Marmaris where Erdoğan was on holiday. The Turkish Parliament and Presidential Palace came under fire from fighter planes; soldiers supporting the coup occupied the bridges over the Bosporus, Atatürk Airport and Taksim Square in Istanbul; the highest-ranking officers of many branches of the military, including Hulusi Akar, the chief of the General Staff, were taken hostage; military helicopters attacked the hotel where Erdoğan was staying. Yet within hours, they had been repelled by large numbers of rapidly mobilized troops and civilians. In the government’s romanticized account, the criminal conspirators, directed by Gülen, were overcome by the spontaneous resistance of thousands of Turkish patriots.

Erdoğan’s response to the coup attempt was systematic and vengeful. Any whiff of association with what the government called FETÖ, an acronym for the ‘Fethullahist Terror Organization’ (Fethullahçı Terör Örgütü), was sufficient cause for dismissal from one’s job, or worse. By September 2016, some 70,000 people had been detained. The events of 15 July became an all-purpose justification for political repression, and many figures unrelated to Gülen and his networks – pro-Kurdish activists, participants in the Gezi Park protests of 2013 – were caught in the dragnet. This was a major milestone in Erdoğan’s transformation from a liberal reformer into an authoritarian demagogue, determined to smother opposition to his increasingly personalist state.

Ensconced in his compound in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, Gülen was now no longer an exile from Turkish secularism, but from the same Islamist political party whose power he had helped to build. Until his death, he steadfastly denied involvement in the coup attempt. While Hizmet was dismantled in Turkey and several other countries, the United States repeatedly refused Erdoğan’s demand for Gülen’s extradition, citing a lack of persuasive evidence. Yet the first major scholarly work on the coup, an edited volume by Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balci, concludes that Gülen likely gave his blessing to the putschists’ plan, even if he was not substantially involved in its execution.

In the AKP’s Turkey, Gülen and his followers continue to be portrayed as agents of imperialism seeking to destroy the nation’s sovereignty. Among the Hizmet diaspora, Gülen is seen as a paragon of Muslim virtue as well as a peerless theologian. The first image is promoted by the Turkish state apparatuses, the second by an international skein of businesses and NGOs. One deploys a hollowed-out discourse of anti-colonialism, the other draws on a depoliticized notion of ‘tolerance’ as the key to a healthy civil society. Both must be read as disingenuous efforts to narrativize the political-economic rivalries and religious conflicts playing out in contemporary Turkey, which will long outlast Gülen himself.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘Turkey at the Crossroads?’, NLR 127.