ISTANBUL // With nearly every one of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s speeches, the list of invectives used to describe Turkey’s most powerful Islamic movement keeps growing.

To the prime minister, the group is a “parallel state”, a “state within the state”, a network of “spies”, “traitors”, “leeches”, and “hashashin”, the modern incarnation of medieval Persian assassins.

The Gulen community, or cemaat, as it is formally known, has attracted its share of controversy over the past decade. Today, however, amid a mushrooming corruption scandal that has riveted the country for months, , it is under more scrutiny and pressure than ever before.

Investigations and leaked documents implicating Mr Erdogan and a number of other officials in bribery, censorship, and other sleaze first came to light in mid-December, setting off a political earthquake.

In the months that followed, Mr Erdogan denied or ignored most of the charges against him, alleging that at least part of the evidence was forged, and accusing the cemaat, a one-time political ally, of masterminding the scandal to bring down his government. Leading figures within the movement claim to have had no prior knowledge of the investigations.

So far, however, the spiral of recriminations and denials has yielded few new facts about the Gulenists. With Mr Erdogan having dragged the group onto the political stage, there is still little agreement as to what the movement actually is, how it works, and what it is after.

To many of its critics and enemies, including the prime minister, the cemaat, which boasts millions of followers worldwide, is a sect dominated entirely by the man after whom it is named, Fethullah Gulen, an elderly preacher tucked away in a Pennsylvania estate. (Mr Gulen left Turkey in 1999 amid accusations that he had called on his followers to overthrow the country’s secular order. He was cleared of the charges in 2006.) The movement’s prep schools and dorms, claims Mr Erdogan, have become incubators for bureaucrats inside the Turkish political and legal systems who owe their allegiance to Mr Gulen alone.

“Their prosecutors,” he said during a speech on Friday, “open trials not according to their conscience, not according to the law, but on orders and instructions from Pennsylvania.”

Pro-government newspapers, meanwhile, have pounced on claims made by a cemaat defector, who has likened the group to a pyramid. Its bottom tiers feature common followers, several media outlets, banks and NGOs loyal to Mr Gulen, as well as hundreds of schools. The middle tiers encompass local “big brothers”, senior bureaucrats, as well as those with direct access to “Pennsylvania”.

The top tier belongs to Mr Gulen alone.

None of this could be further from the truth, says Mustafa Yesil, Mr Gulen’s personal friend and head of the Writers and Journalists Foundation, a group that manages the cemaat’s public relations in Turkey.

To Mr Yesil, the movement is not a pyramid but a series of overlapping circles, a network of people and groups bound together simply by their admiration for Mr Gulen.

Those groups “might occasionally hold meetings, share ideas, sometimes over the phone, sometimes in person,” says Mr Yesil, “but they operate autonomously.”

A series of wiretapped conversations featuring Mr Gulen, which appeared on the internet earlier this year, gives a somewhat different impression.

Speaking over the phone, the cemaat’s leader is heard discussing a run on Bank Asya, a bank operated by his followers, welcoming news that a media mogul would refrain from publishing allegations against him, and musing about which Turkish company should be awarded the contract for a refinery deal in Uganda.

All that the recordings reveal, contends Mr Yesil, is that Mr Gulen is kept in the loop. There is no question of his making major strategic decisions, however, he insists. “This isn’t a movement that is administered by a single centre.”

Instead, Mr Gulen’s daily activities include teaching a group of up to twenty students, delivering sermons, some of them posted online, reading, and meeting with visitors. “He takes maybe two or three phone calls a day.”

Quoting a former government minister, Mr Yesil waves aside any talk of a parallel state within the Turkish police and judiciary as a “whole a lot of baloney.”

“Of course there may be people sympathetic to the cemaat within the bureaucracy,” he says, “but you don’t need to be a Gulen sympathiser to investigate a crime as serious, as grave as this huge corruption.”

The officials involved, many of whom have since been removed from their posts in what Mr Yesil refers to as a mass cover-up, were simply doing their job, he says.

“They didn’t need any orders from the outside.”

Ilhan Cihaner, an opposition lawmaker, thinks otherwise. As chief prosecutor in Erzincan, a city in Turkey’s north-east, Mr Cihaner looked into the activities of the cemaat and other Islamic groups in the late 2000s.

“It had its own hierarchy,” he says of the movement. “A teacher could give orders to a security official simply because he had the support of the [cemaat’s] imam in Erzincan.”

Mr Cihaner’s probe was cut short when he was arrested on charges of belonging to an ultranationalist terror group. He claims his arrest was made on the orders of prosecutors loyal to Mr Gulen and he sees the movement’s fingerprints all over the latest corruption scandal.

“None of this comes as a surprise to me,” he says, “neither in terms of what the cemaat is able to do, nor in terms of the corruption of which the government is accused.”

The cemaat might have some things in common with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, in that it references Islam and aspires to political power, he says.

But the differences outweigh the similarities.

The Brotherhood turned into a political party, he says, while the cemaat shows no intention of doing so.

“They don’t have a large voter base,” he says. “Their power derives from placing their people in strategic positions in state institutions… media companies… and businesses.”

Compared to the Brotherhood, he says, they’re much more nationalistic, much more focused on the economy, and much less transparent. “The cemaat is run like a holding.”

“Only political systems which rest upon the principle of full transparency can demand that civil society be transparent as well,” Mr Gulen himself quipped in a recent interview.

For four months now, Mr Erdogan and his officials have argued the exact opposite: that their government has no obligation to answer to a movement as opaque as the cemaat.

Their narrative seems to have carried the day.

On March 30, Mr Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) scored a resounding win in Turkey’s local elections, earning over 45 per cent of the vote, allegations of voter fraud notwithstanding. Later surveys revealed that AKP voters appeared mostly indifferent to compelling evidence of government graft. The night of the AKP’s victory, Mr Erdogan threatened revenge against the Gulenists.

“As I have said, from now on, we’ll walk into their dens,” he said. “They will pay for this.”

foreign.desk@thenational.ae