Among the various religious groups that underpin Erdoğan’s rule, the Gülen movement has played a unique role. It stayed out of politics and at a distance from Erbakan. But from the 1970s onward, the movement built a significant following in the bureaucracy, not least because its members had received a high-quality secular education, unlike many in the other orders. The movement was especially well represented in the judiciary and police. In the 2002 elections, the Gülen movement lent its support to the AKP, but continued to maintain its distance. The movement’s politicization began in earnest after 2007, when a confronta- tion occurred between the AKP and the Turkish military. This solidified the informal alliance between the AKP and the followers of Fethullah Gülen, who harbored strong resentments against the military and judiciary for persecutions launched in the aftermath of the 1997 military intervention. The Gülen move- ment made common cause with the AKP’s leadership, and deployed its assets in the bureaucracy, particularly in the judicial system and police, to stage a counter- attack on the secularist elites that sought to bring down the AKP government, including through an effort to have the courts close the party down.
As a result, the AKP and the Gülen movement jointly developed the massive Ergenekon and Balyoz court cases, which landed hundreds of military officers, bureaucrats, journalists and academics in jail on charges of seeking to overthrow the government.22It now appears that the Gülen movement, which was able to
mobilize hundreds, if not thousands, of followers in the government bureaucracy, used this opportunity to seek an ever-growing level of influence over state institu- tions. After the 2010 constitutional referendum, the movement was able to cap- italize on the changes in the judicial sector to effectively take control of both the
police and the judiciary. This conflicted with Prime Minister Erdogan’s increas- ingly bold efforts to centralize power: he had decided that Turkey needed a super- presidential system of government in order to turn himself into an elected sultan. Clearly, in such a scheme, he saw the Gülen movement as just another religious community he could subordinate to his interests. The Gülen movement, it seems, had other ideas. Its representatives say they objected to Erdoğan’s undemocratic aspirations on principle; critics would retort, with considerable evidence, that they wanted to be co-owners of the state, effectively exercising a veto power on gov- ernment policy. The former explanation is undoubtedly true for many of the movement’s more democratic followers. But judging by the abuses committed in the Ergenekon and Balyoz trials, it is clear that the movement’s representatives in the bureaucracy were more interested in power than democracy.
This tension ultimately led to a prolonged power struggle. It began when pros- ecutors affiliated with the Hizmet movement attempted to detain the head of Turkish intelligence, Hakan Fidan, one of Erdoğan’s closest confidantes. In re- sponse to this challenge, Erdoğan methodically worked to break down the move- ment’s influence by transferring, demoting, and firing many officials. At the same time, Erdoğan took on the movement’s educational institutions. This confron- tation turned ugly in December 2013, after the Hizmet-affiliated prosecutors accused four government ministers of large-scale corruption and arrested many of their associates and family members, and prepared to strike against Erdoğan’s family, a move that the latter narrowly prevented. This led the government to seek a tactical alliance with secular and nationalist forces in the judiciary.
Erdogan had not expected this Hizmet attack, but moved on the offensive at home and abroad. Abroad, he tried to convince foreign leaders from Central Asia to Africa to close the same Hizmet schools he had only recently urged them to open. At home, he forged an unlikely and unholy alliance with the same army he had only recently undermined with the help of the Hizmet. In the process, hun- dreds of civilians and officers that had been sentenced to long jail terms in the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases were freed. Erdoğan went as far as openly admitting his mistake and implicitly apologizing to the military in a speech at the Turkish Military Academy. However, Erdoğan’s claim to have been misled by the Hizmet is disingenuous given the determination with which he supported the purges of the military establishment. At the time of writing, dozens of alleged followers of Fethullah Gülen had been thrown in jail by special courts set up for that purpose. This internecine struggle in the Islamic conservative milieu is important because it is unique: it is by far the biggest fight ever to occur between Islamic groups in Turkey. Never before had competition between religious groups led to a total break-
down in relations; but then again, never before had religious groups enjoyed prac- tically unchecked power in the country. The impact of this struggle will be felt for decades to come. And while the byzantine shifts of political alliances are bewildering to the outside observer, one thing seems certain: Turkish politics is now defined by the relationships among and between religious orders and communities.