In 1962, a 21-year-old imam, Fethullah Gülen, arrived in the southern Turkish port of Iskenderun to finish his military service. He also gave sermons in the town’s main mosque. This was the heyday of secular Turkey, and he quickly ran into difficulties from a secularist commanding officer who, seeing his sermons as a threat to the republic, ordered that he should be detained for two weeks.
Another officer, however, had a different approach. Spotting that the young soldier was highly intelligent and well-read in Islamic religious texts, but with almost no formal education inside the conventional school system, he recommended that Gülen should start reading western literary classics as well. The young recruit began to read, and enjoy, Dante, Camus and Dostoevsky, eventually developing a taste even for the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
This was perhaps the moment when the career pursued by Gülen, who has died aged 83, began to deviate sharply from that of most Turkish imams. In the next six decades he became internationally famous, feted especially in the US, while writing about 50 books, sponsoring dialogue between Christians and Muslims, and heading a global religious brotherhood with a great number of schools in five continents and a vast international business network. However, this trajectory would end in mortal conflict with the Turkish state, with Gülen accused of terrorism by the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and tens of thousands of his followers in jail, stripped of assets or in exile.
To his admirers, including US members of Congress and Christian theologians, Gülen remained a virtual saint, a Muslim cleric on friendly terms with the western world. In Turkey, among many Turks other than his own following, Gülen was a deeply sinister figure whose efforts to capture the state culminated in 2016 in a botched military coup in which more than 200 people died.
One of eight children, Gülen was born in the village of Korucuk in north-eastern Turkey at a time of severe wartime hardship. His father, Ramiz, was a village imam connnected with the conservative Naqshbandi Sufi brotherhood, while his mother, Refia, combined raising livestock and a family with teaching Qur’an classes for girls.
Gülen had only three years of formal primary schooling. However he knew parts of the Qur’an by heart at the age of four and the whole of it when he was eight. At 13 he became a pupil for five years at an underground theological school at the Kurşunlu mosque in Erzurum. In his mid-teens he joined a new brotherhood, the Nurcus, who supported the adoption of western science while vehemently opposing the republic founded by Kemal Atatürk and its westernising reforms. Gülen worked with the Nurcus until he set up his own brotherhood in the early 1970s.
In 1959, Gülen received his icazetname (Islamic studies diploma) as a preacher, making him an official of Turkey’s presidency of religious affairs, a state Sunni organisation, which posted him to a mosque in Edirne. He remained a government imam until 1981. His powerful emotional sermons quickly won him a wide reputation, and he was known as “the weeping imam”. His followers wept with him. He began organising teaching and discussion meetings, usually before prayers. These marked the first beginnings of his global movement.
Around 1966, Gülen was transferred to a mosque in Izmir on the Aegean, and it was there that his career took flight. In 1971 he suffered a severe setback when the military threw out Turkey’s civilian government and he was arrested and imprisoned for seven months. By the mid-70s, though, Gülen had become a well-known lecturer as well as preacher, travelling across the country to talk on topics such as the gift of prophecy, the Qur’an and science, and Darwinism.
Nevertheless, he learned to live discreetly and to disguise his actions. Even though he publicly supported Turkey’s 1980 military coup because it crushed communism and opened the way to religious education, he lived under cover for six years because some in the pro-military establishment saw him as an Islamist.
“You could say I was protected by high friends in Ankara,” he told the Turkish journalist Mehmet Ali Birand in 1998. After a tipoff during a pilgrimage to Mecca, he returned to Turkey by hiring a smuggler to take him over the mountains, minefields and barbed wire of the Syrian border. Another time he was detained and taken to a military barracks, to be released only after then prime minister Turgut Özal held a midnight cabinet meeting about the case.
Gülen’s teachings extracted universal values from Islam, accepted their commonalities with those of other cultures and religions, and promoted the study of western science. His genius lay in doing so without being so specific as to offend pious Muslim values. “I tried to show the way. It’s as if a crystal broke into little pieces, scattered left and right. I’m trying to bring this society’s pieces back together again, to provide education, and as much as I can, to advise people to serve what I believe in,” he said.
His rise was assisted by the steady growth in the numbers of Turkish students studying in Islamic vocational schools, partly as a result of moves by the military after the 1980 coup to stem the growth of leftist movements by encouraging religious education. In towns across Turkey, businessmen joined the brotherhood, prayed with it, and paid up to a fifth of their income to it, apparently in return for a promise that they would never be allowed to fail commercially.
The movement was eventually a founding influence on more than 1,000 schools in Turkey and abroad as well as several universities of its own. Some had high academic standards and were especially popular in under-served countries in Africa and Central Asia. For a time they were even standard-bearers of expanding Turkish commercial and cultural influence. However, the Gülenist movement is also suspected of using the schools as a means to recruit high-performing new members.
The way in which these various activities were organised and financed remained very mysterious. Though there seem to have been “imams” in charge of different parts of Turkey and “abis” (big brothers) issuing strict orders at the local level, no hierarchy or plan was ever revealed. Gülen himself claimed that he had only set up a few model institutions, which were copied and spread spontaneously. The Gülenist movement has long preferred to call itself “Hizmet”, or service.
Gülen lived modestly as a celibate cleric beside a teaching centre and mosque. He maintained that the Prophet Muhammad had come to him in a dream and told him not to marry. By the 90s his health was failing because of diabetes and heart problems, but he had become an internationally leading figure in Islamic-Christian dialogue, even meeting Pope John Paul II in 1998.
In March 1999, he received a tip-off, apparently from sources within the government of Bülent Ecevit, that the security forces and the country’s intelligence services were about to arrest him, and he escaped in haste to the US. In Turkey the military put him on trial in his absence.
The most damning piece of evidence produced by the security services was a clandestine video of Gülen telling his followers to capture state power by waiting and “moving within the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centres”. The accusations against him did not prevent Gülen from being given a green card to reside in the US, in 2002.
At the end of that year, Turkey’s Islamists finally took power in Turkey and Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP) formed a strong government. Gülen stayed in the US, despite sharing much of the AKP’s religious-nationalist world view and repeated invitations to return to Turkey. He declined to do so even after the court charges against him collapsed.
Meanwhile the influence of his followers grew steadily. The Gülenists had very few ministers in AKP cabinets, but they increasingly dominated the police, the ministry of justice, parts of the foreign ministry, and many government agencies, as well as much of the press. Their main obstacle was the army, until then supremely powerful in Turkey.
In 2008 prosecutors from Gülen’s movement began a series of arrests against army officers, journalists and others, on what proved eventually to be completely bogus terrorism and conspiracy charges, relying on faked evidence. By 2011, the crackdown had forced into submission the old military elite, long dominant as the country’s self-appointed guardians of Atatürk’s secularist legacy.
In 2012 Gülenist prosecutors attempted to question the head of the security services over secret truce talks with Turkey’s Kurdish militants. The incident rang alarm bells in the government, and in 2013 relations between the ruling AKP and Gülen and his followers turned into undisguised conflict. In a bid to impede Erdoğan’s government in December that year, Gülenist prosecutors ordered two rounds of arrests of figures close to ministers on corruption charges.
Erdoğan and Gülen were locked in a power struggle, but by the end of 2014 the government had broken the power of the movement in the police and the judiciary. Many senior Gülenist officials began fleeing abroad and Gülen’s press and media empire came under pressure.
One institution where the Gülenists retained secret supporters was the armed forces. This is why Erdoğan’s government blamed Gülen’s movement for the bloody but curiously clumsy attempt at a military takeover on 15 July 2016. Gülen denied the accusations against him, claiming that Erdoğan set up the coup as a false flag event in order to seize sole control of the country.
Whatever the real cause, Erdoğan has ruled supreme since then. The Gülenist movement has never recovered. Gülenists were purged throughout the country. Even in villages, followers were detained, lost jobs, saw property confiscated, suffered discrimination from state institutions or were ostracised. Ankara moved sharply to seize control of or close down as many of the Gülenist schools as possible.
The Turkish government issued a “red” international arrest warrant for Gülen and made numerous attempts to have him extradited to Turkey, but all were rejected by the US authorities. Though stateless, he continued to live in Pennsylvania.
He is survived by some of his seven siblings, and many nephews and nieces.
• Mohammed Fethullah Gülen, religious leader, born 27 April 1941; died 20 October 2024
• This obituary has been revised since David Barchard’s death in 2020.
