The group has been active in Germany for many years, operating 150 tutoring centres in the country, 30 government-recognised schools and a dozen interfaith dialogue projects. It has long been seen as a moderate Islamic group although it has faced criticism over a lack of transparency.
What is happening in Turkey right now makes the McCarthy era in the US look like a picnic. When communists were targeted under McCarthyism they were blacklisted; hundreds were jailed, and many were compelled to leave the country. In Turkey it is not communists, but Gulenists. Anyone remotely associated with the Gulen movement is being rounded up and jailed – not by the hundreds, but by the tens of thousands.
Some TL 12 billion (about $4 billion) in property has been transferred to the Treasury as part of an investigation into the Gülen movement, said Minister for Environment and Urbanization Mehmet Özhaseki on Thursday. Immediately after the putsch, the government along with Erdoğan pinned the blame on the Gülen movement without credible evidence.
A Turkish prosecutor in İzmir, investigating the financial links of the Gülen movement, which is inspired by the views of US-based Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, has claimed that the organizational structure of the group is the same as that of the Mormon Church and the Church of Scientology in the United States and that all three groups were founded by US intelligence agency the CIA.
Police in Germany are investigating whether calls to boycott shops owned by supporters of the self-exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen constitute hate crimes. There are currently 15 open investigations. Police in the southern German city of Stuttgart said Wednesday they were investigating calls to avoid patronizing Gülen-friendly stores, shops and restaurants as potential hate crimes.
With its leafy playing fields and historic buildings on the site of a former British army barracks, the Wilhelmsdtadt School in the Berlin suburb of Spandau could easily be mistaken for a English boarding school.
In the late evening of Friday, July 15, word spread across the world that a coup was under way in Turkey. The president was missing, the military announced it had taken control of the country, and a few hours later, in the early hours Saturday morning, the coup was over.
Turks, who make up the majority of Germany’s immigrant community, claim their schools and mosques are being spied on by Erdogan’s undercover agents to root out supporters of Fethullah Gülen – the man the Turkish president claims is behind July’s bloody military coup.
Abdallah Kheri, who in Kenya heads the Islamic Research and Education Trust, worries that shuttering Gulen schools and other institutions could leave a vacuum that the so-called Islamic State will seek to fill. “Closing down the institutions would definitely grant gains to the fundamentalists,” he said. In Kenya, the Rev. Wilybard Lagho, Mombasa Roman Catholic diocese vicar general, said he would lament the demise of Gulen schools.
I am not trying to absolve one side or the other. The coup attempt was a heinous assault on Turkey’s civilian politics and the plotters must be punished in a fashion that deters similar actions in the future. What I am trying to understand is why everyone agrees that Gulenists did it when there is little evidence and that is even questionable.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s former speechwriter and current Justice and Development Party (AK Party) deputy Aydın Ünal wrote on Thursday that Erdoğan has never liked Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen and that his call for Gülen to return to Turkey in 2012 was a political maneuver.