Who is Fetullah Gulen

Debate is raging in Turkey over what role, if any, self-exiled Islamic cleric Fetullah Gulen and his throngs of supporters in government jobs played in last week’s abortive coup. But one man has little doubt of Gulen’s guilt – his former second-in-command.

Together Gulen and Latif Erdogan – no relation of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – built the Hizmet (Service) movement, which has since infiltrated the army, the judiciary, the prosecutors’ offices, and the wider civil service.

“When it failed, Gulen told the media 'I opposed the coup' – but I know that every stage the coup plan was edited and approved by him”,  Latif Erdogan told the newspaper Vatan.

“Hundreds of people would have died if the coup had been successful. The country would have slipped inevitably into civil war. Gulen is a cruel, cruel man. Turkey has avoided catastrophe. They didn’t expect people to take to the streets to defy the tanks.”

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Besides the difference between Gulen’s “social Islam” and the AKP’s “political Islam,” there are other contrasts, according to Aykan Erdemir, who was until last year an MP for the Republican party, Turkey’s old Kemalist party, and is now a senior fellow at the US-based Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

“Gulen is not a Muslim Brotherhood-supporting Islamic authoritarian. I would call the Gulenists heirs of Turkish Anatolian Sufi Islam, pious and economically liberal. Gulen himself is unequivocally a pro-European Union and Atlantic person, a free marketeer and a pragmatist on Israel,” he told Middle East Eye in 2014. “Erdogan is at his core a populist reactionary, a state capitalist and a crony capitalist. Although he favours the EU and Atlanticism, it’s only pragmatic. He’s really against them.”

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