New York: He is influential, he has a lot of admirers, he is on Turkey's most-wanted list and lives on a 260 acre gated compound in the the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.
Meet Fethullah Gulen, one of Turkey's most important scholars. He has been accused by Turkey's president Recip Erdogan of plotting to overthrow his government.
He is already on trial in Turkey but he appears to be not worried about the prospect of being deported from the US. In reality, the US also appears not keen to send him back to his native country to face the charges in court.
As Associated Press quoted Y Alp Aslandogan, who gets to meet Gulen once a week as president of the New York-based Alliance for Shared Values, a group that promotes Gulen's ideas, as saying, “He said that the United States has a long tradition of democracy and rule of law. They will see that these are politically oriented charges, and they will not allow Erdogan to spread his ambition into the United States.”
Away from the heat that he is generating in Turkey, Gulen spends his time in prayer on the grounds of the Golden Generation Worship & Retreat Center, an Islamic retreat founded by Turkish-Americans.
Not much is known about Gulen's personal life and his links to all the ventures run by his followers.
One such project concerns running 150 taxpayer-funded charter schools in the US.
Some these schools had come under the FBI radar for alleged financial mismanagement and tax fraud.
As per the AP reports, “One of the most explosive claims, levelled by a lawyer who is representing the Turkish government in a U.S. lawsuit against Gulen, is that the schools are importing Turkish teachers to identify impressionable students and indoctrinate them into Gulen's movement, sometimes called Hizmet, Turkish for service."
Gulen had first burst into the scene some 50 years ago as an imam. He promoted a new philosophy that was a combination of a mystical form of Islam and support for democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.
Reports claim that his followers run 1000s of schools and other educational institutions across the world and the estimate on the number of his followers varies from at least 500,000 to 4 million people.
