Turkey’s Erdogan Battles Country’s Most Powerful Religious Movement

By Piotr Zalewski / Istanbul

Time.com December 4, 2013

Both were religious men. In the early 1970s, Cemal Usak and Recep Tayyip Erdogan were classmates at the Istanbul Imam Hatip Lisesi, an Islamic high school. By the end of the decade, their career paths had begun, ever so slightly, to diverge. “I was coming from what you would call a tradition of cultural Islam,” says Usak. “He opted for political Islam”. Still, he says, the pair remained close.

Today, forty years removed from his high school days, Usak is a leading figure in Turkey’s largest Islamic movement, the Gulen community. Erdogan, meanwhile, is the country’s Prime Minister and by far the most powerful man in the land, if not the entire region. Usak still counts the Turkish leader as a personal friend, but the alliance between the groups that each man represents – and which helped bring Erdogan to power – is fast unraveling. For the first time in years, the glue that binds Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is being put to the test.

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