Fethullah Gulen, cleric accused of orchestrating Turkish coup, dies at 83

• Gulen’s powerful movement dismantled in Turkey after failed coup.
• He was close ally of Turkish leader Erdogan until they fell out.
• Followers of Gulen’s movement say it promotes moderate brand of Islam.
  

Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric based in the United States, who built a powerful movement in Turkey and beyond but spent his later years mired in accusations of orchestrating an attempted coup against Turkish leader Tayyip Erdogan, has died.

Herkul, a website which publishes Gulen’s sermons, said on its X account that the 83-year-old cleric died on Sunday evening in the US hospital where he was being treated.

He was a one-time ally of Erdogan but they fell out spectacularly, and Erdogan held him responsible for the 2016 attempted coup in which rogue soldiers commandeered warplanes, tanks and helicopters.

Some 250 people were killed in the bid to seize power.

Gulen, who had lived in self-imposed exile in the US since 1999, denied involvement in the putsch.

According to its followers, Gulen’s movement — known as “Hizmet” which means “service” in Turkish — seeks to spread a moderate brand of Islam that promotes Western-style education, free markets and interfaith communication.

Since the failed coup, his movement has been systematically dismantled in Turkey and its influence has declined internationally.

Known to his supporters as Hodjaefendi, or respected teacher, Gulen was born in a village in the eastern Turkish province of Erzurum in 1941. The son of an imam, or Islamic preacher, he studied the Holy Quran from infancy.

In 1959, Gulen was appointed as a mosque imam in the northwestern city of Edirne and began to come to prominence as a preacher in the 1960s in the western province of Izmir, where he set up student dormitories and would go to tea houses to preach.

These student houses marked the start of an informal network which would spread over the following decades through education, business, media and state institutions, giving his supporters extensive influence.

This influence also spread beyond Turkey’s borders to the Turkic republics of Central Asia, the Balkans, Africa and the West through a network of schools.