The Gulenists’ success was their undoing. By the early 2010s, they had amassed enough power to pose a threat to Mr Erdogan. “There was a time when they virtually ruled Turkey,” says Gokhan Bacik, an academic formerly close to the movement, now living in exile. They overreached by trying to torpedo peace talks with Kurdish insurgents, going after Turkey’s intelligence chief in 2012, and implicating Mr Erdogan in a corruption scandal the year after. Turkey’s strongman responded by declaring war on the cemaat and removing its loyalists from the bureaucracy. The purges went into overdrive after the coup attempt.

Much about the night of the putsch remains unclear. Some 250 people died in what resembled an army mutiny accompanied by a series of terror attacks more than a traditional coup. The official version, in which Gulenist sleeper cells in the armed forces awoke to take over the country all on their own, seems as watertight as a teabag. To this day, Turkey’s government has not produced evidence of what the plotters planned to do once they seized power.The coup itself appears to have been the work of a small but diverse coalition. Yet there is no doubt that the Gulenists played a big part. At least some of the officers who directed the violence turned out to be graduates of the Gulen system.Two of the civilians involved appear to have seen Mr Gulen in America only days earlier. Analysts agree there is no chance Gulenist operatives would have acted without their leader’s approval. Mr Gulen denies involvement.

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