In 2008, shortly after he wrote a letter of recommendation to the US Government asking to give Gulen the special US residence visa, Fuller wrote a book titled The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World. At the center of the book was praise for Gulen and his "moderate" Islamic Gulen Movement in Turkey:
"Gulen's charismatic personality makes him the number one Islamic figure of Turkey. The Gulen Movement has the largest and most powerful infrastructure and financial resources of any movement in the country" The movement has also become international, by virtue of its far-flung system of schools"in more than a dozen countries including the Muslim countries of the former Soviet Union, Russia, France and the United States."
During the 1990s, Gulen's global political Islam Cemaat spread across the Caucasus and into the heart of Central Asia all the way to Xinjiang Province in western China, doing precisely what Fuller had called for in his 1999 statement: "destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia."
By the mid-1990s, more than seventy-five Gulen schools had spread to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and even to Dagestan and Tatarstan in Russia amid the chaos of the post-Soviet Yeltsin era.
Gulen never left the United States after that, curiously enough, even though the ErdoÄŸan courts later cleared him in 2006 of all charges. His refusal to return, even after being cleared by a then-friendly ErdoÄŸan AKP government, heightened the conviction among opponents in Turkey about his close CIA ties, Frederick William Engdahl argues.
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