What happened to the community's strategic mind?

If I were asked which is the foremost movement in Turkey that displays strategic reason or behavior as a civil society movement, my answer would unquestionably be the Gülen community. It has always given the impression of having set itself very distant goals and of being on a determined, step-by-step march toward them.

The words Gülen spoke in his 1999 tape, which our friend Hilal Kaplan recalled in recent days, were in essence a perfect summary of this strategic reason. Among the strategies and tactics shared confidentially within his own community are withdrawing when necessary, seeming to do nothing, but acting when the time comes, when the risk factor has been reduced almost entirely to zero. Near the end of his long speech Gülen says:

"Every step is early until you draw the power in the constitutional institutions to your front. Until the moment you mature, until the moment you reach the strength to carry the world on your back, until the moment the things that will represent that power are in your hands, until the moment you draw the power in all the constitutional institutions, by the measure of the structure of the state in Turkey, to your front, every step is considered early."

Within this strategic march, managing its own image also holds an important place. There is an extraordinary public diplomacy aimed at exonerating themselves in the eyes of people who think negatively of them and at creating the perception they want of themselves. In the activities carried out through a series of organizations, foremost the GYV, the effort to achieve this holds an important place.

There was a time when they made a remarkable effort to get people to accept that they were "not a community, but civil society." It was in this period that I was invited to Samanyolu TV to make the first sociological assessment of the community. Honestly, as they expected of me, I did not refrain from saying that it was a civil society, but their being so did not change the fact that they were a community. A community can also be a civil society, and a civil society formation also displays community characteristics anyway. The sociological literature was suited to producing the answer they wanted, but their thinking that the perception of community that they believed existed in the public was "bad" drove them to the effort of substituting the concept of "civil society" for it.

I wonder whether the movement, which cared about even a single person in order to steer the perception about it, which took people around its schools around the world when necessary, and which spent a ton of money trying to prove how innocent, how tolerant, humanist, in favor of democracy and dialogue, how non-political and civil it is, is aware of the perception about itself these days.

Otherwise, it would be useful for them to read as a sincere warning what is written by someone like Bekir Berat Özipek, who for years responded positively to such efforts of the community. Actually, is it only Özipek? Many names such as Ahmet Taşgetiren and Yusuf Kaplan could not praise the community and its work highly enough until now. I confess that I did not display a different attitude either. I still maintain my opinion that, as long as they remained within the limits in which the schools abroad were presented during PR work, they played the role of a very beneficial soft power, a social capital, a colonizing dervish for Turkey.

But I also think that the prestige acquired through those schools is being spent in an extremely wasteful manner these days. When the respect produced through these activities, which everyone appreciates, was attempted to be converted into the power to establish tutelage over politics in Turkey, neither respect nor the positive perception that had been so carefully built up all these years remained.

I am writing this article in Germany. On the one hand I am busy with the agenda of a conference I am attending, on the other I am chatting with the Turks I meet. As in Turkey, the Community is on everyone's agenda, and the rapid change in the perception of people, the great majority of whom looked very favorably on the Community until only 1-2 months ago, is striking. The Community has been thrown into an adventure, but this has melted away many things it had accumulated with care over 40 years. The question of in whose name a structure that has always left me in admiration with its strategic reason and behavior has taken such a great risk is still not meaningless.

While trying to manage its own image, the Community was spending great sums of money and effort. Yet spending forty years of labor all at once took only a few days.

The social-media robots keep reading, one by one, accompanied by rhetoric of ingratitude, how everyone has changed. Let them not look far; no one has changed except themselves.

Mümtazer Türköne, who appears to have taken on the task of drawing up death certificates, might kindly do a check-up of the community, and let us see what comes out?

NAZLI ILICAK'S HOCAEFENDI, YEAR 1997...

Nazlı Ilıcak's broadcasting of footage from 1997 on CNN was in a way a good thing. One gets an opportunity for an accounting. The image of Fethullah Gülen, who despite declaring his support for the February 28 coup by saying "Erbakan has also been around too long, let him go now," could not escape the threat of having his schools closed, standing beside Süleyman Demirel, the real architect of the coup, tells a great deal. Nazlı Ilıcak says: "That day the February 28 people persecuted him by threatening to close his schools, and now the AK Parti repeats the same persecution by closing the prep schools." Again, a statement for which we cannot even tell where to begin correcting.

1. First of all, on February 28 Gülen stood not with those who took the coup but with those who made it, and therefore stood against politics.

2. His schools were not closed; the moment it was mentioned, he immediately handed the key to the putschists.

3. Now the prep schools are not being closed by targeting the community; they are being transformed within the scope of a general education reform.

4. In any case, no religious education is given in the prep schools; they are only used to recruit staff from there.

5. In return for the humble attitude he showed toward the February 28 people who persecuted all the religiously observant, he has turned lion against Erdoğan, who has established a throne in the hearts of the devout, and is part of a coup attempt against him.

I said all of this on air as well, but the community's broadcasts only relayed what Ilıcak said, so I thought, let us at least complete it.