Muhammed Fethullah Gulen Hocaefendi (Turkish: [fetul'lah jy'len] - the honorific Hoca Efendi, used among followers, translates to "respected teacher"); born 27 April 1941 is a Turkish preacher, former imam, writer, and political figure. He is the founder of the Gulen movement (known as Hizmet meaning service in Turkish), which is 3 to 6 million strong in Turkey and has an empire of affiliated banks, media, construction companies, and schools, especially those providing primary and secondary education, in Turkey (in which business entities and foundations have been closed down by the Turkish government by the thousands in 2017) and in Africa, Central Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Hizmet's most populous organization is a moderate Islamic advocacy group, Alliance for Shared Values.

Despite Gulen's and his followers' claims that the organization is non-political in nature, analysts believed that a number of corruption-related arrests made against allies of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reflect a growing political power struggle between Gulen and Erdogan. These arrests led to the 2013 corruption scandal in Turkey, which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)'s supporters (along with Erdogan himself) and the opposition parties alike have said were choreographed by Gulen after Erdogan's government came to the decision early in December 2013 to shut down many of his movement's private pre-university schools in Turkey.  The Erdogan government has said that the corruption investigation and comments by Gulen are the long term political agenda of Gulen's movement to infiltrate security, intelligence, and justice institutions of the Turkish state, a charge almost identical to the charges against Gulen by the Chief Prosecutor of Turkey in his trial in 2000 before Erdogan's party had come into power. Gulen had previously been tried in absentia in 2000, and acquitted of these charges in 2008 under Erdogan's AKP government.  In emailed comments to the Wall Street Journal in January 2014, Gulen said that "Turkish people ... are upset that in the last two years democratic progress is now being reversed", but he denied being part of a plot to unseat the government. Later, in January 2014 in an interview with BBC World, Gulen said "If I were to say anything to people I may say people should vote for those who are respectful to democracy, rule of law, who get on well with people. Telling or encouraging people to vote for a party would be an insult to peoples' intellect. Everybody very clearly sees what is going on."  According to some commentators, Gulen is to Erdogan what Trotsky was to Stalin. Ben Cohen wrote: "Rather like Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Soviet Red Army who was hounded and chased out of the USSR by Joseph Stalin, Gulen has become an all-encompassing explanation for the existential threats, as Erdogan perceives them, that are currently plaguing Turkey. Stalin saw the influence of "Trotskyite counter-revolutionaries" everywhere, and brutally purged every element of the Soviet apparatus. Erdogan is now doing much the same with the "Gulenist terrorists."

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