The Gülen community and the AKP

Abstract

The Gülen movement has two wings. The civil wing runs operations that a civil society institution would run, does charity work, and has a broad base of followers. The second wing is militarist, organized both horizontally and vertically within Turkish bureaucracy. The Gülen movement is most densely organized within the substructures of the security bureaucracy; these include the police force, the military, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), and the judiciary. Although the Gülen movement argues that it is not involved in politics, actually it is right at the center of politics. Having organized within the security bureaucracy means owning the state. The goal of the community is to have an organizational network that can shape the state in line with their interests; they want to have more say within the state bureaucracy so that they can implement their social engineering policies with more ease. The Gülen movement has a presence in the education community, in charity work, in all parts of the security apparatus, in every one of Turkey's bureaucratic institutions from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Agriculture, and in the business community from small grocery stores to large factories with 10,000 workers.