Fethullah Gulen shares blame for Turkey’s plight

YOU MIGHT think that by now Turkey had run out of handcuffs. But although the wave of arrests related to the bizarre coup attempt that rocked the country in the summer of 2016 has certainly slowed, it has not stopped. Every week seems to bring a new round-up of suspected members of the Gulen community, or cemaat, the Islamist movement that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames for the coup. At least 41 people, many of them soldiers, were detained on July 27th. Warrants for over two dozen others were issued last week.

Nearly 600,000 people, most of them suspected Gulenists, have been investigated since the coup; nearly 100,000 have been arrested. Most had only tenuous links to the movement, such as having an account at a Gulenist bank. Some appear to have been tortured in captivity. But while there is sympathy among Turks for individual victims of Mr Erdogan’s purges, there is practically none for the cemaat as a whole, and even less for its leader, Fethullah Gulen, an ageing imam living in exile in Pennsylvania. Ask almost anyone in Turkey, including Mr Erdogan’s most bitter foes, and you will hear that compared with Mr Gulen, Turkey’s leader is the lesser of two evils. Mr Erdogan is an autocrat and a bully. But no one helped him cripple Turkey’s democracy more than Mr Gulen and his sect...