People with Turkish flags swarm Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge during a July 2017 rally to mark the first anniversary of a failed coup attempt that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed on U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen. The 83-year-old preacher died Sunday in a Pennsylvania hospital. File photo by Tolga Bozoglu/EPA
Oct. 21 (UPI) — Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish dissident cleric, accused of orchestrating an abortive 2016 coup against his one-time backer, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom he shared a vision of a greater role for Islam in secular Turkey has died. He was 83 years old.
Gulen died Sunday in the United States, where he lived in self-imposed exile, as he was receiving treatment for heart and kidney failure, according to his Hizmet movement, in a hospital near his home in eastern Pennsylvania where he had been living in exile for 25 years.
His “service” movement caught the eye of Erdogan after rising to prominence opening schools across Turkey and internationally with so-called Gulenists diversifying into business and rising through the ranks of government and the military whose support he courted.
However, the decade-long marriage of convenience between Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party drew the ire of some Turks who alleged the two pro-Islam forces were eroding secularism and sleep-walking Turkey into a society where Islam was the state religion.
AKP-Hizmet relations soured in 2013 when Erdogan allies working in government were the subject of an anti-corruption probe that he alleged, without accusing them directly, was the work of a gang directed by Gulenists overseas.
Erdogan went after Gulen’s schools and, alleging the Gulenists of being “a state within a state,” purged the government of Gulenists and in May 2016 proscribed it as a terror organization.
When sections of the Turkish military moved on parliament and government institutions in July 2016 targeting them with tanks and warplanes and attempting to abduct Erdogan — with more than 250 killed in the fighting and the subsequent crackdown — Erdogan accused Gulen of being behind it.
Erdogan and Turkish officials rejected Gulen’s denials his group was involved but the fact he had been living in the United States for so many years led to accusations he was working with the U.S. government to curb Turkish power.
Repeated failures to succeed in persuading U.S. authorities to extradite him to face a trial in a Turkish court added fuel to the fire, further damaging already frayed relations between Ankara and Washington.
Confirming Gulen’s death, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said he had headed a “dark organization” and that supporters should reject the movement.
Gulen wrote in a piece in piece in The New York Times published in 2016 arguing that he had always preached in favor of democracy and an “inclusive, pluralist” tolerant version of Islam and against armed insurrection.
Erdogan’s allegations, he wrote, were a demonstration of his “systematic and dangeous drive toward one-man rule.”
The party he founded, the AK Justice and Development Party, has been in power with Erdogan as prime minister or president since 2002.
