Gulen had discovered that the secular Turkish Republic suffered from a cultural void. Gulen's movement is the story of modern Turkey's evolution towards Islam.
In 2000, Gulen was charged with treason by the Turkish state, in the pre-Erdogan era. The year before, a video had surfaced in which Gulen said: "You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers". Until that time, any step taken would be too early, like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch." Gulen denied the charge, claimed the video had been tampered with. In 2006, he was acquitted of all charges of conspiracy.
By then Turkey had gone through a tectonic shift under Erdogan. The dominance of secularists and their allies in the military was over. The rise of AK Party shrunk the space for secularists. Erdogan himself wasn't a Gulenist, but both he and the Gulen movement had a common enemy in the old elites. It was a natural alliance. Erdogan's biggest gain was to get the army out of politics. The support of Gulenists and their cultural affiliation of Islam were immense.
Gulenists are accused of running a parallel society in Turkey. When AK Party-backed constitutional referendum was passed in 2010, Erdogan hailed the strong support of Gulen and his media. However, rift soon began to surface. Erdogan became more powerful and more authoritative. Gulen spoke against the Turkish Marmara Flotilla issue that aimed to break the Gaza blockade and was attacked by Israeli forces in 2010. This was the moment when Erdogan began suspecting a "Gulen-Israel axis" with the US as puppet-master. He believed Gulen had joined forces with Zionists and the West who wanted to weaken Turkey.
An international geo-strategic analyst William Engdahl has no doubt Gulen is a CIA prop. His arguments are compelling. "There is more to Gulen and his Cemaat" than its pious mask.
The US feared the Soviet Union during the Cold War in 1970's. It also kept an eye on Turkey. The Soviet Union and Turkey were both God-less nations. Gulen and his moderate Islam fitted the US agenda. He could cause "unrest" among Muslims of Turkey or ones in the Soviet Union and its Central Asian vessel states. Central Asia is also a vital region between China and Russia.
The Chechnya terror of the 1990's alarmed Russia. It understood the Muslim orientation of Gulen's methods. Russia moved swiftly to ban Gulen's schools. Gulen was further alarmed when Kurdish movement leader Abdullah Ocalan was kidnapped from Nairobi and brought to Turkey in 1999. Sensing he would be next, Gulen fled to the United States.
Erdogan, Ocalan and Gulen are three power centers of Turkey. Erdogan runs the country; Gulen runs a "parallel state" with his "cells" in police, security, intelligence, army, education etc. in the thousands, while Ocalan, as head of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), holds sway over 10 million Kurds or 18% of Turkish population. Before his arrest in 1999, clashes between PKK and the state had cost Turkey 40,000 lives. For a decade, between 1999 to 2009, Ocalan was the sole prisoner on the Imrali Island in the Sea of Marmara.
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