Traditional camel wrestling in Burhaniye district of Balikesir, Turkey on January 26, 2014. (Hakan Firik/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)[/caption]Who will win the power struggle between Turkey’s two most powerful Islamic groups: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party or the movement affiliated with Fethullah Gülen? Five weeks since a corruption scandal first hit the Turkish republic, and the answer is increasingly looking likely to be neither.
The scandal saw prosecutors launch probes into allegations of corruption involving the sons of cabinet ministers and the CEO of a state bank. Followers of Fethullah Gülen, the former imam living in self-imposed exile in the US, hold top positions in the judiciary and police and are said to be behind the probes.
At first, Erdoğan and his government came off worse. Erdoğan had always insisted on referring to his Justice and Development Party (AKP) by its Turkish initials “AK,” meaning “pure.” The AKP was presented as an alternative to the corrupt coalitions that ruled the country during the 1990s. It was always a myth, of course, but it was only with the December 17 investigations that the illusion was laid bare for everybody to see.
Five cabinet ministers resigned, one of them saying that Erdoğan himself had always held ultimate responsibility for corrupt construction tenders and should resign too. A week later, in what looked like a literal-minded response to an Internet sermon by Gülen, in which he called down the wrath of God on the sinful (“May God rain down fire on their houses, may he destroy their households”), another prosecutor began an investigation into corruption allegedly involving Erdoğan’s own son. The prime minister bluntly ordered police not to assist prosecutors in their probe.
The probes also seemed designed to further damage the AKP’s already tarnished international reputation. Key to the first probe was an allegation that ministers were colluding in Iranian sanctions-busting. The later allegations involving Erdoğan’s son accused him of having business links to a man the US considers a terrorist. The implication of all this is clear, the Turkish analyst Svante Cornell writes: “These probes strengthened and perhaps cemented Western suspicions of Erdoğan’s collusion with anti-Western regimes and Islamic extremists, thus serving to further weaken Western support for his government.”
But Gülen has been hit hard too. His movement has for decades followed a strategy of what critics would call “infiltrating” the state apparatus. The AKP benefited from that infiltration when fighting the old secular elite after 2004, and reciprocated by—in the words of Orhan Gazi Ertekin, a leading observer of Turkey’s legal system—“surrendering” control of the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), which is responsible for all senior judicial appointments.
Erdoğan’s response since anti-government probes began has been a massive push to rid the bureaucracy of Gülen supporters. A fifth of the country’s district police chiefs have been purged. An estimated 5,000 police have been moved to less critical positions. (One former head of police intelligence, for example, is now head of traffic police in a small Anatolian town.) More difficult to budge, prosecutors and judges are being dealt with via a bill that will tighten the government’s grasp over the HSYK.
There is also increasing evidence that the government may be planning a clampdown on businesses close to the movement. Once a mainstay of ministerial visits abroad, TUSKON, a powerful business confederation linked to Gülen, is no longer invited to party knees-up. A court summarily closed a mine owned by Akın İpek, a pro-Gülen businessman who owns a newspaper and TV channel. According to the Turkish media, institutional depositors loyal to the AKP have over the last month withdrawn the equivalent of 20 percent of the total deposits of Bank Asya, an Islamic lending bank founded by members of the Gülen movement, in an effort to try to sink it.
If anything, though, the most serious damage the movement has sustained has been to its image. Unlike Erdoğan, whose popularity stems from his image as a fighter, Gülen has always presented himself as a gentle-mannered man, hidden away from the rough and tumble of Turkish politics in his Pennsylvania mansion. Again, that apolitical persona always was a facade, but it is only now that that is widely understood. Many Turkish people were horrified by his recent sermon in which he cursed sinners. It wasn’t so much the violence of the language as the look on his face when the outburst was over. “I’ve said what I haven’t said up to now,” he says calmly, turning his face to one side, brushing the arm of his seat with one hand, and pulling his lower lip down in an expression of disgust, in a striking parody of a Robert De Niro mafioso.
What now seems clear is that the war between the two factions will continue until local elections on March 30, a major staging post for the prime minister’s hopes to solidify his one-man rule of the country by getting himself elected president.
For some observers, the Gülen movement’s attacks on Erdoğan have ended that ambition. Possible, but not certain: for many rank and file followers of Gülen, love for the movement and the leader of the AKP is not an either/or issue. They love both. And even if they are shocked by the prime minister’s attacks on their spiritual leader, who else are they going to vote for?
But one thing is for sure: Turkey’s Islamic movement will never be the same again. Never again will it be able to present itself as a pure-hearted and above all united front against oppression.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
