Among the mounting headaches for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan – in Washington this week for a visit that notably does not include a formal sitdown with President Obama – is a 74-year-old Muslim cleric quietly living on a private compound in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.
Fethullah Gulen, a one-time Erdogan ally, is the head of a faith-based social movement that boasts a global following, has deep roots in Turkish society, and cultivates notable influence in the U.S. education through a network of roughly 150 secular charter schools.
But a nasty split between the two over Erdogan’s years-long crackdown on domestic dissent and Turkey’s once-open media landscape has now spread to the United States, and threatens to further destabilize an already frayed alliance.
“It is Erdogan’s way of fighting the corruption without obviously confronting the issue of corruption.”
- Professor Henri Barkey, expert on Turkey
More than 2,000 Gulen supporters have been arrested in Turkey on various charges since the 2013 split, though many were later released. And Turkish authorities recently seized control of one of Turkey’s largest newspapers, Zaman, which was associated with Gulen.
But what’s relatively new to many Americans only now hearing about Gulen is a high-profile, multimillion-dollar public relations and legal effort by the Erdogan government to extradite him to Turkey, and raise myriad questions about the propriety of the charter schools.