The US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who built a powerful Islamic movement in Turkey and beyond but spent his later years mired in accusations of orchestrating an attempted coup against Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has died. He was 83.
Herkul, a website which publishes Mr Gulen’s sermons, said on its X account that he had died on Sunday evening. Mr Gulen was being treated in a hospital in Pennsylvania.
The cleric was a one-time ally of Mr Erdogan but they fell out spectacularly, and Mr Erdogan held him responsible for the 2016 attempted coup in which soldiers commandeered warplanes, tanks and helicopters. Some 250 people were killed in the bid to seize power.
Mr Gulen, who had lived in self-imposed exile in the United States since 1999, denied involvement in the putsch but his movement was designated a terrorist group by Turkey.
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Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan confirmed his death, describing him as the leader of a “dark organisation” and saying that Turkey’s fight against the group would continue. “Our nation’s determination in the fight against terrorism will continue, and this news of his death will never lead us to complacency,” Mr Fidan told a press conference.
According to its followers, Mr Gulen’s movement — known as Hizmet, or “service” in Turkish — seeks to spread a moderate brand of Islam that promotes western-style education, free markets and interfaith communication.
Since the failed coup, his movement has been systematically dismantled in Turkey and its international influence has declined.
Known to his supporters as Hodjaefendi, or respected teacher, Mr Gulen was born in a village in the eastern Turkish province of Erzurum in 1941. The son of an imam, or Islamic preacher, he studied the Koran from infancy.
In 1959, he was appointed as a mosque imam in the northwestern city of Edirne and came to prominence as a preacher in the 1960s in the western province of Izmir, where he set up student dormitories and would go to tea houses to preach.
These student houses marked the start of an informal network that would spread in the following decades through education, business, media and state institutions.
His influence also spread beyond Turkey's borders to the Turkic republics of Central Asia, the Balkans, Africa and the West through a network of schools.
Mr Fidan said he hoped Mr Gulen’s death would lift a “spell” over Turkish youth who had taken a path of “betrayal” against their country under the pretence of religious values. “This is not a good road,” he added.
Mr Gulen had been a close ally of Mr Erdogan and his AK Party, but growing tensions in their relationship exploded in December 2013 when corruption investigations targeting ministers and officials close to Mr Erdogan came to light.
Prosecutors and police from Mr Gulen’s Hizmet movement were widely believed to be behind the investigations and an arrest warrant was issued for Mr Gulen in 2014.
Soon after the 2016 coup, Mr Erdogan described Mr Gulen’s network as traitors and “like a cancer”, vowing to root them out wherever they were. Hundreds of schools, companies, media outlets and associations linked to him were shut down and assets seized.
Mr Gulen condemned the coup attempt “in the strongest terms”.
Mr Gulen was also reviled by Turkey’s opposition, which saw his network as having conspired over decades to undermine the secular foundations of the republic. — Reuters
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