Turkey’s prominent journalist Fehmi Koru answered Ece Uner’s questions on Haberturk TV. He also made comments about the AK Party-Gulen Movement conflict and the probability that the Gulen Movement may engage in active party politics.
Koru said, “What you call as the movement is a civil society organization. They let politicians do the daily politics. They have political opinions and they try to influence politics. But they do this by having relations with politicians as they did in the past. It is against the nature of the movement to impose any opinion on the government. If there is sharp irreconcilable disagreement between the movement and the AK Party, they may found a political party. But if they do so, they will lose the advantage of being a [civil society] movement. They will face more criticism when they found a political party.
Back to school in Turkey after post-coup teacher purge
As more than 18 million children began the new term after the summer break, Huseyin Ozev, president of the Istanbul teachers’ union, told AFP there were fears the academic year would begin with “chaos” because of huge staff shortages.
What is this bedlam all about?
So, as expected, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared all-out war. The enemy — what he and his advisers regard as “the junta formation within the police,” the media, the judiciary, the American Embassy, affiliates of the mainly volunteer Hizmet movement, and, well, whoever seems to disagree with the way he intends to run the country and whoever tends to believe there is no smoke without fire — have dug their trenches in a circle.
A Muslim voice to be heeded
The majority of Muslims openly and loudly reject violent extremism regardless of the religious or ethnic identity of the perpetrator, but that is not what the Western media focuses on. If we closely look into a broad poll, we will see hundreds of Muslim leaders denouncing terrorism, and one of these Muslim voices that we don’t listen to is Fethullah Gülen.
The Gülen Movement in the public sphere
The Abant Platform is a good example of a religiously inspired social capital formation in a society with ideological, ethnic and religious fault lines. This platform departs from a belief that religion, and particularly Islam, can be a positive factor in social, political and economic life. The Gülen movement has been quite successful in utilizing its cultural and human capital in order to empower the civil society and expand the democratic space available for the formally excluded periphery vis-à-vis the centre.
US-based Turkish cleric denies involvement in coup plot
Fethullah Gulen told reporters at his Pennsylvania compound he knows only a “minute fraction” of his legions of sympathizers in Turkey, so he cannot speak to their “potential involvement” in the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Comments on Turkey coup attempt by Prof. John Whyte
Prof. John Whyte’s comments on recent coup attemtp in Turkey.
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