Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish-born Muslim cleric who oversaw a global network of schools, media outlets, think tanks and charities from exile in the United States and was vilified in his homeland for alleged attempts to take over the state, died on Oct. 20.

His death was announced by Herkul, a website run by his followers. He was reportedly 83, though those close to him say he was actually about three years older.

Mr. Gulen long suffered from a heart condition and diabetes and lived mostly in seclusion in a compound in rural eastern Pennsylvania near Saylorsburg, where he took up residence after arriving in the United States in 1999. In a social media post, Herkul said he died at the hospital where he was receiving treatment, without providing additional information.

Geopolitical intrigue shadowed Mr. Gulen’s life. Turkish authorities said he masterminded a putsch launched by a renegade faction of the military on July 15, 2016, that sought to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The revolt was quashed, but not before dozens of pro-government protesters were gunned down by anti-Erdogan forces. The president narrowly escaped capture while at a seaside resort.

Advertisement

Erdogan and his allies said Mr. Gulen’s organization had steadily planted its followers within the machinery of the state — the military, police and judiciary — and had been waiting for the right moment to strike. Mr. Gulen rejected any connection to the coup plot.

Despite the demands of Turkish politicians, U.S. officials under the Obama administration did not initiate proceedings for Mr. Gulen’s extradition to Turkey. This became a point of tension between Washington and a vital NATO ally, especially as Turkish cooperation was needed to help end Syria’s civil war and to cope with its exodus of refugees.

In the months after the coup attempt, Turkey launched an unprecedented purge of the nation’s institutions, firing tens of thousands of suspected “Gulenists” from bureaucratic jobs and jailing thousands more, while closing universities and media outlets perceived to be Gulenist fronts.

Advertisement

“If there is anything I told anyone about this verbally, if there is any phone conversation, if one-tenth of this accusation is correct … I would bend my neck and would say, ‘They are telling the truth. Let them take me away. Let them hang me,’” Mr. Gulen told CNN host Fareed Zakaria in the wake of the coup attempt, while lamenting the “witch hunt” he said was set in motion.

Soner Cagaptay, who follows Turkish affairs at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said “officers aligned with the Gulen movement formed the backbone of the coup effort.” But, he cautioned, “it will probably be very difficult to find hard evidence” linking Mr. Gulen himself to the coup. It’s believed he rarely, if ever, used text messaging to communicate important instructions to his followers.

Through the aid of wealthy supporters, Mr. Gulen cultivated a national movement starting in the 1970s. He hosted reading groups and summer camps and developed a network of dormitories — known as “houses of light” — for male university students seeking affordable lodging in a rapidly urbanizing Turkey.

Advertisement

Mr. Gulen’s spiritual teachings proliferated through pamphlets and audio recordings. He emphasized service, tolerance and dialogue, principles that form the bedrock of what his followers describe as a kind of “civic Islam” compatible with modernity and scientific inquiry.

Not unlike an American evangelist, he extolled enterprise and the creation of wealth as virtues. But he was no firebrand. Exuding a quiet charisma, Mr. Gulen adopted in his later years the mystic authority of a hermit in his sylvan lodge. Doting followers likened him to a Muslim Dalai Lama.

Critics accused Erdogan of using the failed overthrow as a pretext to consolidate power and further cement his rule. He became the country’s prime minister in 2003 with the support of religious Turks such as Mr. Gulen as well as the goodwill of the international community, who saw Erdogan as a liberal reformer shaking up a rigidly secular Turkish state long dominated by an interfering military.

Advertisement

Two decades later, Erdogan was widely viewed in the West as an autocrat intent on reshaping the republic in his image. Mr. Gulen and his followers, meanwhile, were cast as national pariahs, implicated in “deep state” plots.

Mr. Gulen pulled no punches when it came to his views of the Turkish president. “All narcissistic dictators and tyrants like Hitler and Stalin have a bad ending,” Gulen told a German publication in 2020, gesturing to Erdogan. “Their reign always ends in fury. He will suffer the same fate.”

Building a movement

Muhammed Fethullah Gulen was born in Korucuk, a village outside the eastern Turkish city of Erzurum.

He learned Arabic from his father, a local imam, and is said to have delivered his first sermon at age 14. His pious upbringing came at a time when the governing ideology was an almost militant secularism, anchored in the legacy of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and embraced by the political classes of Turkey’s cosmopolitan coastal cities.

Advertisement

Mr. Gulen preached a form of Sufi Islam steeped in the traditions of his Anatolian homeland. In 1958, he became a state-licensed cleric and set up shop in Edirne, near Turkey’s land border with Greece. His career took off eight years later after he was transferred to a mosque in Izmir, a city on the Aegean Sea.

As his supporter base grew, so did Mr. Gulen’s reach. By the 1980s, a network of private Gulenist schools spanned the country. As Turkey’s economy grew, Mr. Gulen’s followers were thick among the ranks of a nouveau riche.

They started or controlled a range of businesses, from large construction firms to retail companies to publishing houses. In 1986, Gulenists acquired the Zaman newspaper; it became Turkey’s highest-circulation broadsheet until Erdogan’s government ordered it closed in 2016.

Advertisement

Mr. Gulen’s foothold eventually extended well beyond Turkey’s borders. Clear figures on Mr. Gulen’s notoriously opaque network are hard to come by. At its peak in the early 2000s, however, the organization operated schools, hospitals and charities in more than 100 countries, including the United States, and probably counted its supporters in the millions.

Split with Erdogan

By the 1990s, a generation of Mr. Gulen’s sympathizers began to enter various corners of the Turkish state’s bureaucracy. His critics say this was by design, an infiltration that would prefigure a takeover of the government from within. He countered that it was simply the consequence of the education and natural talents of Turks who came through his organization’s schools.

Whatever the case, Mr. Gulen was with Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, when they came to power in 2003. For years, the AKP — a center-right, religiously minded party — found common cause with the Gulenists as they sought to refashion the rigidly secular Turkish state.

Advertisement

The two camps operated somewhat in tandem as Erdogan instituted sweeping changes to the country’s economy and then set about defanging Turkey’s military, which long saw itself as the defender of secularism and led coups or exerted influence over politics for decades. But as Erdogan’s power deepened, the Gulenists came to be seen as a threat.

The Turkish government embarked on a rolling crackdown on Gulenists within state institutions and shut down numerous Gulenist schools, a key source of revenue.

By the end of 2015, Turkey declared Mr. Gulen’s organization a “terror group,” leading Turkish officials to liken the preacher to al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden or Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian cleric who fomented revolution from afar before seizing the reins of government in 1979.

“If [Mr. Gulen’s organization] is a terrorist group, if he’s more dangerous than bin Laden, why did Erdogan support the movement for more than a few years, why did they openly patronize Gulen-sponsored events?” asked Sevgi Akarcesme, a former leading journalist at Zaman, who spoke in 2016 from exile in Belgium.

Advertisement

She said Mr. Gulen, whose followers referred to him as “hocaefendi,” or master teacher, was unjustly vilified by the Turkish media.

Cagaptay said the struggle between Erdogan and Gulen summed up the “enigma” that is Turkey: “In the end, it was not his pro-Ataturk secular opponents, but the politically similar Gulenist allies who would become Erdogan’s nemesis.”

Mr. Gulen never married, and a complete list of survivors could not be immediately determined.

In the last years of his life, Mr. Gulen remained austere and ascetic in his habits and kept a monkish detachment from a world that seemed to close in around him.

“I wish my grave not to be known,” he told the New Yorker magazine. “I wish to die in solitude, with nobody actually becoming aware of my death and hence nobody conducting my funeral prayer. I wish that nobody remember me.”