Fethullah Gulen: Self-exiled Turkish spiritual leader and Erdogan foe dies in Pennsylvania

Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive US-based Islamic cleric and one of the biggest foes of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has died after a long illness in Pennsylvania at the age of 83.

Gulen led a movement called Hizmet that was condemned as a “terrorist” organisation by the Turkish government and accused of orchestrating an abortive coup attempt to topple Mr Erdogan’s administration in 2016. He denied the allegations repeatedly.

Gulen’s death was confirmed by his nephew Kemal Gulen who spoke to Abdullah Bozkurt, the former editor of the Gulen-linked Today’s Zaman newspaper.

Turkish state media quoted foreign minister Hakan Fidan saying that Gulen’s death had been confirmed by Turkish intelligence sources.

Gulen spent the last decades of his life in self-exile, living on a gated compound in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains from where he continued to wield influence among his millions of followers in Turkey and beyond. He espoused a philosophy that blended Sufism – a mystical form of Islam – with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Gulen was as an ally of the Turkish leader until 2013, but became a foe after he called Mr Erdogan an authoritarian bent on accumulating power and crushing dissent.

Mr Erdogan cast Gulen as a terrorist, accusing him of orchestrating the attempted military coup on the night of 15 July 2016 when factions within the military used tanks, warplanes and helicopters to try to overthrow Erdogan’s government.

Heeding a call from the president, thousands took to the streets to oppose the takeover attempt. The coup plotters fired at crowds and bombed parliament and other government buildings. A total of 251 people were killed and around 2,200 others were wounded. Around 35 alleged coup plotters were also killed.

Gulen denied involvement, and his supporters dismissed the charges as ridiculous and politically motivated.

Gulen had lived in Pennsylvania since 1999 and was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 2017.

Turkey put Gulen on its most-wanted list and demanded his extradition, but the US showed little inclination to send him back, saying it needed more evidence. Gulen was never charged with a crime in the US, and he consistently denounced terrorism as well as the coup plotters.

In Turkey, Gulen’s movement was subjected to a broad crackdown. The government arrested tens of thousands of people for their alleged link to the coup plot, sacked more than 130,000 suspected supporters from civil service jobs and more than 23,000 from the military, and shuttered hundreds of businesses, schools and media organizations tied to Gulen.

Gulen called the crackdown a witch hunt and denounced Turkey’s leaders as “tyrants”.

“The last year has taken a toll on me as hundreds of thousands of innocent Turkish citizens are being punished simply because the government decides they are somehow ‘connected’ to me or the Hizmet movement and treats that alleged connection as a crime,” he said on the one-year anniversary of the failed coup.

Turkish foreign minister on Monday said Gulen’s death “will not make us complacent”. “Our nation and state will continue to fight against this organization, as they do against all terrorist organisations,” he added.

Gulen was born in Erzurum, in eastern Turkey. His official birth date was 27 April 1941, but that has long been in dispute. Y Alp Aslandogan, who leads a New York-based group that promotes Gulen’s ideas and work, said Gulen was actually born sometime in 1938.

Trained as an imam, or prayer leader, Gulen gained notice in Turkey some 50 years ago. He preached tolerance and dialogue between faiths, and he believed religion and science could go hand in hand. His belief in merging Islam with Western values and Turkish nationalism struck a chord with Turks, earning him millions of followers.

Gulen’s acolytes built a loosely affiliated global network of charitable foundations, professional associations, businesses and schools in more than 100 countries, including 150 taxpayer-funded charter schools throughout the United States. In Turkey, supporters ran universities, hospitals, charities, a bank and a large media empire with newspapers and radio and TV stations.

But Gulen was viewed with suspicion by some in his homeland, a deeply polarised country split between those loyal to its fiercely secular traditions and supporters of the Islamic-based party associated with Erdogan that came to power in 2002.

Gulen had long refrained from openly supporting any political party, but his movement forged a de facto alliance with Erdogan against the country’s old guard of staunch, military-backed secularists, and Gülen’s media empire threw its weight behind Erdogan’s Islamic-oriented government.

Gülenists helped the governing party win multiple elections. But the Erdogan-Gulen alliance began to crumble after the movement criticized government policy and exposed alleged corruption among Erdogan’s inner circle. Erdogan, who denied the allegations, grew weary of the growing influence of Gülen’s movement.

The Turkish leader accused Gulen’s followers of infiltrating the country’s police and judiciary and setting up a parallel state, and began agitating for Gülen’s extradition to Turkey even before the failed 2016 coup.

In 2000, with Gulen still in the US, Turkish authorities charged him with leading an Islamist plot to overthrow the country’s secular form of government and establish a religious state.

Some of the accusations against him were based on a tape recording on which Gulen was alleged to have told supporters of an Islamic state to bide their time: “If they come out too early, the world will quash their heads.” Gulen said his comments were taken out of context.

The cleric was tried in absentia and acquitted, but he never returned to his homeland. He won a lengthy legal battle against the administration of then-president George W Bush to obtain permanent residency in the US.

Rarely seen in public, Gulen lived quietly on the grounds of an Islamic retreat center in the Poconos. He occupied a small apartment on the sprawling compound and left mostly only to see doctors for ailments that included heart disease and diabetes, spending much of his time in prayer and meditation and receiving visitors from around the world.

Gulen never married and did not have children. It is not known who, if anyone, will lead the movement.

Tributes poured in for Gulen on Monday, with supporters remembering him as a “man of faith who transformed the lives of millions of people across the world”.

“Another voice of peace muted, a great loss to humanity,” wrote Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi.