Thanks to all who sent this in: Michael Rubin wrote a great article (for the AEI) about the danger of Islamization of Turkey, and about a man called Fethullah Gülen. Rubin explains: “Few U.S. policymakers have heard of Fethullah Gülen, perhaps Turkey’s most prominent theologian and political thinker. Self-exiled for more than a decade, Gülen lives a reclusive life outside Philadelphia, Pa. Within months, however, he may be as much a household a name in the United States as is Ayatollah Khomeini, a man who was as obscure to most Americans up until his triumphant return to Iran almost 30 years ago.”

Many academics and journalists embrace Gülen and applaud his stated vision welding Islam with tolerance and a pro-European outlook. Supporters describe him as progressive. In 2003, the University of Texas honored him as a “peaceful hero,” alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. Last October, the British House of Lords and several British diplomats celebrated Gülen at a high-profile London conference. Later this year, Georgetown University scholar John Esposito will host a conference dedicated to the movement. As in 2001, Esposito will cosponsor with the Rumi Forum, an organization Gülen serves as honorary president.

O yes, they all love Gülen.

The Gülen movement controls charities, real estate, companies, and more than a thousand schools internationally. According to some estimates, the GÜlen movement controls several billion dollars. The movement claims its own universities, unions, lobbies, student groups, radio and television stations, and the Zaman newspaper. Turkish officials concede that Gülen’s followers in Turkey number more than a million; Gülen’s backers claim that number is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, Gülen members dominate the Turkish police and divisions within the interior ministry. Under the stewardship of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, one of Gülen’s most prominent sympathizers, tens of thousands of other Gülen supporters have entered the Turkish bureaucracy.

While Gülen supporters jealously guard his image in the West, he remains a controversial figure in Turkey. According to Cumhuriyet, a left-of-center establishment daily–Turkey’s New York Times in 1973–the Izmir State Security Court convicted Gülen of “attempting to destroy the state system and to establish a state system based on religion”; he received a pardon, though, and so never served time in prison. In 1986, the Turkish military–the constitutional guardians of the state’s secularism–purged a Gülen cell from the military academy; the Turkish military has subsequently acted against a number of other alleged Gülen cells who they say infiltrated military ranks.

In 1998, according to Turkish court transcripts cited in the Turkish Daily News, Gülen urged followers in the judiciary and state bureaucracy to “work patiently to take control of the state.” The following year, the independent Turkish television station ATV broadcast a secretly taped Gülen telling supporters, “If they . . . come out early, the world will squash their heads. They will make Muslims relive events in Algeria,” a reference to the Islamic Salvation Front’s overwhelming 1991 election victory in the North African state. After party leaders spoke of voiding the constitution and implementing Islamic law, the Algerian military staged a coup leading to a civil conflict that killed tens of thousands.

Because of his statements and veiled threats, the judiciary in 1998 charged Gülen with trying to “undermine the secular system” while “camouflag[ing] his methods with a democratic and moderate image.” Convicted in absentia, but free to run his organization from his U.S. exile, Gülen continues a rather inconsistent approach to tolerance and secularism. He often equates the separation of religion and state with atheism, an assertion many of Turkey’s most secular officials find offensive: Believing that religion is best kept to the individual rather than state sphere does not equate with any lack of belief in God. In 2004, Gülen equated atheism with terrorism and said both atheists and murderers would spend eternity in Hell.

Gülen has received a legal break, however. In 2002, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (Adalet ve Kakınma Partisi, AKP) won a plurality in parliamentary elections and, because of a fluke in Turkish election law, was able to amplify one-third of the popular vote into a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Erdoğan used this advantage to enact reforms which had the net effect of stacking not only the civil service, but also banking boards and the judiciary with his political supporters and religious fundamentalists. Erdoğan’s judges wasted no time. They placed liens against political opponents’ property, seized independent newspapers and television stations including, not by coincidence ATV, and assigned sympathetic judges to hear appeals against earlier decisions levied against Islamists. On May 5, 2006, the Ankara Criminal Court overturned the verdict against Gülen. While a public prosecutor–a secularist hold-out–appealed the court’s action, the process is now nearing conclusion. Gülen’s supporters are ecstatic. His slate wiped clean, Gülen has indicated he may soon return to Turkey.

If he does, Istanbul 2008 may very well look like Tehran 1979. Just as Gülen’s supporters affirm his altruistic intentions and see no inconsistency between a secretive, cell-based movement and transparent governance, too many Western journalists also give Gülen a free pass.

But Western, progressive intellectuals are busily ignoring what Gülen is all about. And if they don’t, they even embrace him. It is remarkable to see Westerners embrace a man who wants to turn the only modern and secular Muslim country in the world – which should function as a role model for every single other Muslim country – into a Islamic state.

If this sounds familiar, it should: Three decades ago, the same phenomenon marked coverage of Iran. “I don’t want to be the leader of the Islamic Republic; I don’t want to have the government or power in my hands,” Khomeini told a credulous Austrian television reporter during the ayatollah’s brief sojourn in Paris. In November 1978, Steven Erlanger, the future New York Times foreign correspondent, penned a New Republic essay arguing that Khomeini’s vision for Iran was essentially a “Platonic Republic with a grand ayatollah as a philosopher-king,” and predicting the triumph of an independent liberal left worried more about labor conditions in Iran’s oil fields than pursuing any theological tendency.

In Tehran then as in Ankara now, U.S. ambassadors preferred garden parties with the political elite and maintained contacts with only a narrow segment of the population. They were blind. As the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency remained clueless or belittled concerns about Khomeini’s intentions, millions of Iranians turned out to greet their Imam at Tehran’s international airport. Turks now say that similar crowds might greet Gülen when his plane touches down in Istanbul.

Gülen is careful. He will not order the dissolution of the Turkish Republic. But, ensconced in his Istanbul mansion, he could simply begin to issue fatwas prying Turkey farther from the secularism to which Erdoğan pays lip service. As Khomeini consciously drew parallels between himself and Twelver Shiism’s Hidden Imam, Gülen will remain quiet as his supporters paint his return as evidence that the caliphate formally dissolved by Atatürk in 1924 has been restored.

The secular order and constitutionalism in Turkey have never been so shaky. The government now controls most television and radio stations. Erdoğan has gained the dubious distinction of launching more lawsuits against journalists and commentators than any previous Turkish prime minister.

But let us continue to embrace Erdogan, Gülen and the AK Parti: we all know that secularism and liberal democracy are ways for capitalism to spread; they are either part of a conspiracy to turn the entire world into consumers, or – at best – merely a cultural thing, a cultural perspective and ideology. Not inherently better than most other ideologies and systems.

Right?

It truly makes me sick to read articles or posts or comments written by Westerners who are more than willing to surrender Turkey to Islamist forces. They do not just tolerate it, they even encourage it.

I already knew about Gülen – entire books can be written about the man – but it is probably important to share this will all of you, since it is unlikely that you all know who he is, and what his influence on people like Turkey’s current Prime Minister and President is. He is a dangerous individual, and so are his most prominent supporters.

The EU should either stop commenting on what happens in Turkey, or it should embrace the country’s secularists – Kemalists mostly – who are dedicated to turning their country into a modern, open-minded and tolerant nation… unlike Gülen et al.