Who Was Fethullah Gulen, The Influential Islamic Cleric?

Fethullah Gulen, the prominent U.S.-based Turkish cleric, was an influential figure in much of the Muslim world.

The 83-year-old Islamic preacher and educator, who had been suffering from ill health for years, died in hospital in the United States on October 20, according to his personal website.

Gulen headed Hizmet, or Service, an opaque but powerful social and religious movement that sponsors or is affiliated with schools, cultural centers, and universities in over 100 countries.

With millions of followers, Hizmet is generally considered to promote a moderate form of Islam. But it is also regarded as a threat by some countries given its influence in education, business, and media across Central Asia, the Balkans, Africa, and the West.

Gulen, who was based in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, spent his later years mired in accusations of orchestrating an attempted coup in 2016 against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. He vehemently denied the allegation.

Pieter Cleppe, a Brussels-based Middle East expert, said Gulen leaves behind a mixed legacy.

“Building educational institutions is a positive part of his legacy,” said Cleppe. But if the Gulen movement was proven to be behind the coup, “then that’s a whole different judgement call,” he said.

Former Erdogan Ally

The son of an Islamic preacher, Gulen was a one-time Erdogan ally who helped the Turkish president’s religiously conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) come to power in 2002. But the two allies fell out.

Turkey designated Gulen’s movement a terrorist organization in 2016, and it was the target of a massive crackdown. The Turkish authorities fired and jailed tens of thousands of Gulen’s suspected supporters from the military, judiciary, and state bodies.

Since then, the influence of Gulen’s movement has declined globally.

For years, Gulen’s movement was part of Turkey’s “soft power” and intended to expand Ankara’s influence abroad, said Gumer Isaev, head of the St. Petersburg Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies. But “repression destroyed the Gulen movement in Turkey,” he said.

A theologian who came to prominence as the leader of Friday Prayers in Turkey’s western city of Izmir in the late 1960s, Gulen went into self-imposed exile in 1999 when he was accused of trying to undermine the country’s secular state.

The charges against him were later dropped in absentia but he remained in the United States, where he lived as the reclusive leader of one of the Muslim world’s largest faith-based civic organizations.