The always iconoclastic Edward Luttwak had an article in Foreign Policy on the Gulen Movement (GM) coup in Turkey. He cites the reason for the failure of the alliance between the AKP and the GM is competing visions of Islam and Islamism.

In 2013 the alliance between the AKP and GM was dissolved. Luttwak accurately describes the theological difference between the AKP and GM is over the issue of pluralism. The GM is theologically pluralist. It is willing to accept that the world is not Sunni Muslim: however much the GM is about raising a “Golden Generation” of exemplars to humanity, it is not about coercion.

Luttwak is perceptive in identifying the class differences between the GM and average AKP supporter. The GM is an educated elite, and served to staff the technocracy of the government and military. The AKP’s base of support has always been the lower-classes/peasantry of Anatolia. There was utility in an alliance with the GM when the AKP came to power, because it was a cadre of educated islamists which could form a functional islamist bureaucracy. He writes:

So when Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the 2002 elections, it was able to govern Turkey successfully, remaining in power until now, instead of being forced out or dissolved by military order, as with all previous attempts at forming Islamist governments. It was not Erdogan’s brawlers and provincials who implemented the AKP’s economic policies but rather Gulen’s competent technocrats, achieving good results that dissuaded a military intervention, along with obdurate European pressures in the name of democracy, and the vigilance of disguised Gulenists within the officer corps.

This was doubly true after the secularists were purged from the government and military by the Islamists in the Ergenekon (2008) and Sledgehammer (2010) arrests and trials.

Now that the AKP is fully entrenched in the machineries of government, it is now in the business of purging the heretics of the GM from government, and precipitated a failed coup. Analysis to date has focused on a competition for power between two rival patronage networks. This is the standard explanation of Third World politics, but that is intellectually lazy. Luttwak has gotten to a deeper ideological (theological) understanding. Read the whole thing.