Abstract
The Gülen community has two wings. The civil wing runs operations that a civil society institution would run, does charity work, and has a broad base of followers. The second wing is militarist, organized both horizontally and vertically within Turkish bureaucracy. The Gülen community is most densely organized within the substructures of the security bureaucracy; these include the police force, the military, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), and the judiciary. Although the Gülen community argues that it is not involved in politics, actually it is right at the center of politics. Having organized within the security bureaucracy means owning the state. The goal of the community is to have an organizational network that can shape the state in line with their interests; they want to have more say within the state bureaucracy so that they can implement their social engineering policies with more ease. The Gülen community has a presence in the education community, in charity work, in all parts of the security apparatus, in every one of Turkey’s bureaucratic institutions from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Agriculture, and in the business community from small grocery stores to large factories with 10,000 workers.
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Notes
- 1.
The term militarist is used here to denote the Gülen community members who are regarded as being employed by the state to promote the Community’s interest by using state power. Authors discussing the Gülen community refer to Gülen community members in the Turkish Armed Forces and the Police force as the “militarist” wing, but the term is also used to denote Gülen community members in other parts of the security bureaucracy, such as the judiciary.
- 2.
Çağdaş Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği, the Association for the Support of Contemporary Living, is a Turkish nonprofit organization whose declared mission is “the promotion of contemporary education and reforms implemented by Atatürk,” the Turkey’s secular founder (Çağdaş 2017).
- 3.
Çağdaş Eğitim Vakfı, the Contemporary Education Foundation, is a Turkish nonprofit organization whose declared mission is to “secularize education in Turkey” (Çağdaş Eğitim Vakfı 2017).
- 4.
- 5.
Around USD $1.31 in December 2017.
- 6.
After Erbakan’s Virtue Party was banned by the Constitutional Court in 2001, a group within the party parted ways with Erbakan and founded the AKP.
- 7.
Deniz Baykal was the chair of the CHP when tapes from his private life were leaked. Baykal resigned from the chairmanship after the incident (Ete et al. 2014, p. 28).
- 8.
Mavi Marmara is the name of the lead ship of a six-vessel convoy carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. As a result of an Israeli raid on the flotilla on May 31, 2010, nine activists form Turkey were killed (UN General Assembly 2010).
- 9.
The corruption scandals referred to involved two successive police operations on December 17 and 25, 2013. The trials, which targeted numerous state officials, businessmen, and cabinet ministers, forced the resignation of four cabinet ministers. The investigation is widely regarded as the Gülen movement’s attack against the AKP government (Ulusoy 2015, pp. 69–73).
- 10.
Ahmet Şık was once again taken into custody on December 29, 2016, on charges of promulgating “propaganda for terrorist organizations.” His defense statement, given on July 24, 2017, can be read in English as translated by the Solidarity Group for the Freedom of Ahmet Şık at Pen International: http://www.pen-international.org/newsitems/ahmet-siks-defence-statement-on-the-trial-of-cumhuriyet-24-july-2017/. He was released on March 10th pending trial.
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Şık, A., interviewed by Deniz Çakırer (2019). The Gülen Community and the AKP. In: Özyürek, E., Özpınar, G., Altındiş, E. (eds) Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76705-5_9
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