A former Qur’an instructor was sent to prison last week in western Turkey on conviction of membership in a terrorist organization due to her links to the Gülen movement, in one of the latest examples of Ankara’s sweeping crackdown on the faith-based group, the TR724 news website reported.
M.K., a 49-year-old former instructor for a Qur’an course run by the country’s top religious authority, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), turned herself in to the police in the western province of Afyonkarahisar on September 18 after Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s sentence of seven years, six months, according to TR724.
The instructor, who was fired by emergency decree in 2022, had stood trial for alleged ties to the movement, including accusations that she used a mobile phone messaging app named ByLock, deposited money in the now-defunct Bank Asya and enrolled her children in now-closed-down Gülen-linked schools. She denied the charges in earlier court hearings, saying she had dedicated her life to teaching and had no involvement with any organization.
For about a decade Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen and his followers, once praised by Ankara for their work in education and interfaith dialogue, have faced government accusations ranging from orchestrating corruption probes in 2013 to masterminding a failed coup in July 2016. The government designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016.
Gülen and his followers have strongly denied any involvement in the coup or any terrorist activity but have been the subject of a harsh crackdown for a decade, which intensified in the aftermath of the abortive putsch. Gülen died in the US at the age of 83 in October 2024.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the movement since the coup attempt despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
In a landmark decision, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled in 2023 that Turkey’s use of the ByLock messaging app as well as bank accounts and labor union membership as criminal evidence to be unlawful. Yet, this and subsequent ECtHR decisions did not change Turkey’s judicial practices.
The former instructor’s case was among those Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya mentioned in a September 21 post on X, where he announced that 16 people were jailed the previous week following 39 operations targeting suspected Gülen movement members, TR724 said. Yerlikaya also stated that since he took office in June 2023, security forces have carried out 11,667 operations against the movement, leading to more than 19,000 detentions and over 3,500 arrests.
Rights groups and international observers have repeatedly criticized the breadth of the crackdown on the Gülen movement, which has resulted in the dismissal of some 130,000 civil servants, sweeping up judges, prosecutors, military officers, teachers and police cadets.
Following the failed coup, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. More than 24,000 members of the armed forces and over 4,000 judges and prosecutors were among those removed by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown and sought asylum in Europe, north America or other countries.