Fethullah Gülen was a Turkish Islamic preacher and founder of the transnational Hizmet movement. He built a vast global network of schools and universities based on an accommodating theology that reconciled modern science with Islamic belief. Though once a prominent public intellectual, he was later blamed by the Turkish government for the 2016 coup attempt.
Fethullah Gülen: The Preacher Erdoğan Called a Coup Plotter
Two small rooms furnished with a mattress, a prayer mat, a desk, and a treadmill — that was the private world, on a wooded twenty-five-acre compound in the Pocono Mountains, of a man Turkey's government blamed for a failed coup that left more than 250 people dead, and whom Foreign Policy magazine's readers had voted the world's leading public intellectual less than a decade earlier. Fethullah Gülen built one of the largest transnational Islamic movements of the modern era from a scholarship hostel program in provincial Turkey, then watched Ankara dismantle much of it in a matter of weeks.
From an Imam's Son to a State Preacher
Muhammed Fethullah Gülen was born on April 27, 1941 (some earlier sources gave 1938), in the village of Korucuk near Erzurum in eastern Turkey. His father was an imam and his mother taught Quranic recitation, a role restricted under the officially secular Kemalist state. Formal secular schooling ended early for him, but he pursued religious study in Erzurum's madrasas and delivered his first licensed sermon in 1958 as a teenager. He served as a state-employed imam from 1959 to 1981, starting at the Üç Şerefeli Mosque in Edirne, and was imprisoned for seven months following the 1971 military intervention on suspicion of organizing unauthorized religious groups.
A Theology Built for a Secular Republic
Gülen's thinking grew out of the teachings of the Kurdish Islamic scholar Said Nursi, who argued for reconciling modern science with Islamic belief. Gülen developed this into a distinctly accommodating theology: he rejected Islamist politics and state-imposed sharia, arguing instead that observant Muslims should participate fully in secular democratic society and professional life. He was known for the claim that "95% of Islamic principles" concerned personal conduct rather than governance — a formulation that let his followers work comfortably within secular institutions, including, eventually, the Turkish state itself.
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Starting in 1976, Gülen opened "ışık evler" (light houses) — subsidized student hostels built around informal Quranic study circles — that grew over the following two decades into the Hizmet ("Service") movement. By the 1990s it counted millions of adherents. Its most visible achievement was education: by 2014 the movement had opened more than 2,000 schools in over 150 countries, emphasizing science and mathematics instruction, alongside roughly 25 universities, a media arm, and Bank Asya, a Turkish Islamic bank. Turkish students trained in Gülen-linked schools regularly won medals at International Science Olympiads, giving the movement an international reputation for educational rigor distinct from its religious origins. By 2016 the network's assets were estimated at roughly $12 billion.
Alliance, Then Rupture, With Erdoğan
Gülen gave qualified support to the 1980 military coup as a stabilizing force, a position that drew criticism from Turkish liberals. From 2003, Hizmet-aligned civil servants, police, and judges provided crucial administrative backing to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's newly ascendant Justice and Development Party (AKP), helping weaken the country's secular Kemalist establishment. The alliance held for a decade before collapsing in 2013, when Erdoğan's government moved to shut Gülen-linked university preparatory schools and Gülen publicly criticized the government's violent response to the Gezi Park protests. Months later, a sweeping corruption investigation implicated senior AKP figures and forced four cabinet ministers to resign; Turkish prosecutors accused Gülen of directing the probe through sympathetic police and judges, a leaked recording of Erdoğan discussing hidden money with his son drawing three million YouTube views within a day. Gülen denied orchestrating the affair.
Exile, the 2016 Coup, and Extradition Battles
Gülen had relocated to Pennsylvania in March 1999, ostensibly for medical treatment, and never returned. He was tried in absentia in Turkey in 2000 for allegedly conspiring to embed followers in government to undermine the secular state; the conviction was reversed in 2008 under Erdoğan's own government, a sign of the then-functioning alliance. That history collapsed entirely after the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016. Erdoğan blamed Gülen immediately and without presenting evidence Washington found persuasive; Gülen denied any role and called for an international investigation. In the years that followed, Turkish authorities pursued roughly 3 million citizens on terrorism-related charges connected to the alleged "Gülenist Terror Organization," with more than 511,000 arrested, and seized over 2,500 Hizmet-linked institutions worth an estimated $12 billion, including more than a thousand schools and dozens of universities and hospitals. Turkey formally requested Gülen's extradition in July 2016; the FBI, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security opposed it for lack of credible evidence, and successive U.S. administrations declined to hand him over even when Erdoğan proposed trading him for the detained American pastor Andrew Brunson in 2017. Turkey stripped Gülen of his citizenship in 2017. Turkey, Pakistan, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and the Gulf Cooperation Council designated him a terrorist; the EU, US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand did not.
Interfaith Advocate, Contested Figure
Gülen cultivated a public image as an interfaith bridge-builder, meeting Pope John Paul II, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and Israeli Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, and writing in the Washington Post four days after the September 11 attacks that "a Muslim cannot be a terrorist, nor can a terrorist be a true Muslim." He supported Turkey's EU accession bid and, notably for a Turkish Islamic leader of his generation, wrote as early as 1965 of grief over the Armenian massacres. But critics inside and outside Turkey raised separate concerns: former teachers at Gülen schools described gender segregation that excluded women from leadership roles, and rivals accused the movement of building a covert cadre inside police, judiciary, and civil service — the very infiltration Ankara later cited to justify its purges, though independent evidence of a coordinated coup plot was never made public in a form that satisfied Western governments.
Death
Gülen died on October 20, 2024, at a Pennsylvania hospital of heart and kidney failure, aged 83. Because of Turkey's political climate he was buried on the grounds of his Pennsylvania compound rather than in İzmir as he had wished; a funeral in a New Jersey stadium four days later drew about 15,000 mourners. He never married.
Why Fethullah Gülen Is Called a Genius
The praise Gülen drew rarely used the word "genius" in the sense of technical or artistic brilliance; it centered instead on organizational and pedagogical vision — the capacity to translate a provincial theology of quiet civic participation into a functioning global network of thousands of schools, universities, and businesses spanning more than 150 countries, run largely by volunteers acting on his writings and recorded sermons rather than direct command. Foreign Policy's readers ranked him the world's top public intellectual in 2008, and Time named him among its 100 most influential people in 2013 — recognition of reach and institution-building rather than scholarship; his own body of work comprised 44 volumes of essays and sermons rather than original theological research. The honest counter-case is severe: Turkey's government holds him responsible for a coup attempt that killed more than 250 people and has prosecuted hundreds of thousands of citizens on that basis, former teachers in his schools described entrenched gender discrimination, and critics on both the secular and Islamist sides of Turkish politics accused the movement of building a clandestine parallel state inside the judiciary and security services — an infiltration project fundamentally at odds with the open, dialogue-oriented image Gülen cultivated abroad. No Western government's intelligence services validated Ankara's coup allegations to a standard that justified extradition, but neither is Gülen's record of decades-long alliance-building inside Turkey's state apparatus a simple story of a persecuted educator.
Legacy
The Hizmet movement Gülen built now operates in fragments — decimated inside Turkey, where most of its institutions were seized after 2016, but still running schools, dialogue centers, and charities abroad under the Alliance for Shared Values, which pledged after his death to continue "consultative decision-making, localisation, pluralism." Whether history remembers him chiefly as an educational innovator or as the central figure in modern Turkey's deepest political rupture in a generation remains, a year after his death, entirely unsettled.
