December 13, 2013

Strategic defamation of Fethullah Gülen: English vs. Turkish

İhsan Yılmaz

In my last piece, I elaborated on how a Justice and Development Party (AKP) deputy took part in a psychological war campaign in Turkey to present the Hizmet movement to the Turkish people as something that is dirty and that has dubious relations with Jews, Israel and the US at the expense of Turkey, Iran and the Kurds.

Turkish cultural day in the Philippines


A Turkish cultural promotion event took place in the capital Manila, the Philippines. The event featured traditional Turkish dance performances, food, music, and a photography exhibition along with screenings on Turkey’s natural and historical attractions.

End of the Erdoğan-Gülen Partnership?*

Samir Salha

Turkey’s left-wing Taraf newspaper has not finished leaking secret documents capable of inciting crises, bringing down political coalitions, and launching new areas of friction between politicians and military officials in Turkey.

Turkey's Erdogan Battles the Gulen Movement, His One-Time Ally*

Piotr Zalewski

Both were religious men. In the early 1970s, Cemal Usak and Recep Tayyip Erdogan were classmates at the Istanbul Imam Hatip Lisesi, an Islamic high school. By the end of the decade, their career paths had begun, ever so slightly, to diverge. “I was coming from what you would call a tradition of cultural Islam,” says Usak. “He opted for political Islam”. Still, he says, the pair remained close.

Post-Kemalist Turkey and the Gülen Movement

Taha Özhan

Turkey is a country that is in the process of completing its normalization. In its most basic sense, this is a necessary process that both the society and the state have to go through. The problems the state, in a deep crisis of consolidation, was causing regarding religion, citizens’ language, various economic sectors and even its own institutions ironically constituted the groundwork for the emergence of both civil and illegal groups and their mobilization. The state opposed religion based on truisms of the primitive and positivist Western world, in fact, causing the mobilization of both “Islamists and non-Islamist” religious groups by constantly forcing them to fight for their existence. In other words, the existence of certain organizations that emerged from the problems created by Kemalism in a post-Kemalist Turkey naturally presents problems.