Fethullah Gulen is facing extradition to Turkey by Donald Trump – so he should read up about his country


While Gulen looks like a rather cuddly imam, spending his twilight years in American retirement, he has built up an extraordinary system of Islamic schools and charities in the US, UK and Turkey worth billions of dollars. His own movement has withdrawn a book where he justifies wife-beating ‘albeit as a last resort’, describes Christianity as '‘perverted’ and refers to America as ‘our merciless enemy’

Fethullah Gulen says he has no intention of fleeing America if Donald Trump is going to extradite him to Turkey. But the Muslim cleric might like to read a new book before he obliges the Turkish President by climbing aboard a plane for Ankara or Istanbul. Accused of fomenting the attempted coup almost exactly a year ago, he has a touching faith in Turkish justice which has organised the arrest of 50,000 Turks for involvement in the “terrorist” crime. For Ezgi Başaran’s Frontline Turkey: The Conflict at the Heart of the Middle East – published by that ever loyal imprint of IB Tauris, a true friend of the region – reveals a shocking story of police brutality, torture and Turkish secret police crime and involvement with Isis.

It’s also not very nice about Fethullah Gulen himself. Born in Erzerum in 1942, he became a cleric, one of the founders of the “association for fighting communism” – which might appeal to Donald Trump – but Gulenist schools, attended at first by poor children, prepared their pupils to occupy as many posts as possible in the country’s judiciary, police and military. This is Başaran’s contention, and she backs it up with a revealing quotation from Gulen used in an indictment that accuses him of trying to topple the secular state in 1999 and which doesn’t sound very democratic.

“You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the central powers,” he said, according to his charge sheet. “You must wait until such time until you have got all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions of Turkey…”

When he realised he might be arrested in 1999, Gulen failed to obtain a preference visa to the US because, according to the Americans, he was not an “educator”, as he claimed, but “the leader of a large and influential religious and political movement with immense commercial holdings”. But he got a US green card with three reference letters – from a former US ambassador to Turkey and two ex-CIA officials.

So while Gulen looks like a rather cuddly imam, spending his twilight years in American retirement, he has built up an extraordinary system of Islamic schools and charities in the US, UK and Turkey worth billions of dollars – and represented himself as a humble servant of God with moderate ideas. His own movement subsequently withdrew a book on the Turkish market (My Little World) in which, according to Başaran, he justifies wife-beating, “albeit as a last resort”, describes Christianity as “perverted” and characterises America as “our merciless enemy” – not the kind of quote to get you a green card.

Başaran is a journalist who was editor of Radikal – it sometimes ran my own articles, but was closed in 2016 – and her speciality is the Kurds. And Erdogan. And now Isis. She writes that “the new [sic] Turkey” under Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is “rushing headlong towards an authoritarian regime and a new, darker Middle East after the hope of the Arab Spring”. The solution to what is happening in the Middle East is “directly related to Turkey’s 40-year old Kurdish problem and how the Turkish government chooses to deal with it”..........