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Is February 28 Returning Under an Islamist President?

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rose to power promising to liberate Turkey’s religious conservatives from state tutelage. More than two decades later, the destruction of the Gülen movement, the operations against the Süleymancılar and Furkan, the imprisonment of Erdoğan’s strongest secular opponent and the judicial takeover of the CHP suggest a darker conclusion: Erdoğan did not abolish tutelage. He personalized it. There is a profound historical irony at the center of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. Erdoğan emerged from the political tradition that regarded itself, with considerable justification, as one of the principal victims of the February 28 process. His generation experienced a republic in which generals, judges, prosecutors, university administrators and an aggressively secular establishment claimed the authority to determine how visible Islam could be in public life, which religious schools could operate, which Islamic communities were legitimate and even whether a young woman wearing a headscarf could study at university. February 28 was therefore never simply a National Security Council meeting or the removal of Necmettin Erbakan from government. It represented a philosophy of state tutelage in which autonomous religious society was regarded as inherently dangerous whenever it became strong enough to compete with the state for loyalty, education, wealth or political influence. Erdoğan converted that history of humiliation into one of the foundations of his political legitimacy. He promised conservative Turks that never again would unelected institutions classify Muslims as acceptable or unacceptable, determine which religious communities could operate freely or use the machinery of the state to discipline citizens because of their beliefs. Yet nearly three decades after February 28, Turkey is again witnessing autonomous Islamic communities confronted by mass detention, criminal-organization accusations, financial investigations, trusteeships, company takeovers and a media atmosphere in which allegations against religious networks can rapidly become presumed facts before courts establish individual guilt. The extraordinary difference is that the political authority presiding over this process is no longer a secular military establishment. It is an Islamist president. The events of August 2026 have made this contradiction impossible to dismiss. On August 13, authorities carried out a sweeping operation against the Süleymancılar across 17 provinces, detaining community leader Alihan Kuriş and numerous others. Kuriş and 31 other suspects were subsequently jailed pending trial. Prosecutors accuse individuals in the investigation of operating a criminal organization for financial gain and of offenses involving money laundering, fraud and taxation. These are serious accusations, and no religious affiliation can provide immunity from criminal law. If an individual has committed fraud, laundered money or forged documents, prosecutors should prove that offense before an independent court and that individual should be punished accordingly. The democratic problem begins when allegations against individuals are transformed into a criminal identity imposed upon an entire religious community. Only six days later, on Wednesday, August 19, counterterrorism police launched another coordinated operation, this time against Alparslan Kuytul and the Furkan movement. Kuytul was detained at his home in Adana together with his wife, Semra Kuytul, while other Furkan members and associates were taken into custody in raids across six provinces. Police searched 49 locations, and proceedings were announced against 32 suspects. Furkan said one of Kuytul’s lawyers was also among those detained. Five companies were placed under trusteeship, while restrictions were imposed on 349 social-media accounts. The allegations range from establishing or managing a criminal organization to money laundering, fraud, forgery and tax offenses. Again, the argument is not that religious people cannot commit crimes or that every allegation is necessarily fabricated. The issue is whether Turkey is investigating identifiable crimes committed by identifiable individuals or progressively treating politically independent religious communities themselves as suspect social organisms whose leadership, businesses, institutions and communications infrastructure can be attacked before a final judgment establishes guilt. The political sequence surrounding Kuytul’s detention makes this question particularly disturbing. Kuytul had publicly criticized the Süleymancılar operation and argued that the community was being punished because it had ceased reliably supporting Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party. He said some of its members had even supported the secular opposition CHP and declared that, had the community continued voting for the AKP, he was certain the operation would not have occurred. That remains Kuytul’s interpretation rather than an established judicial fact. But what happened immediately afterward transformed his accusation into a much larger political controversy. Oktay Saral, a chief adviser to Erdoğan, publicly told Kuytul that “your turn will come.” Saral also used a Turkish expression warning that the water had already heated up for him. The following morning the police came. Kuytul was detained together with his wife and other members of his movement. When one of the president’s advisers publicly predicts that a critic will be next and counterterrorism officers arrive at that critic’s home the following morning, the government cannot reasonably demand that citizens regard the political threat and the judicial action as completely unrelated events. The broader question is therefore not whether Erdoğan remains an Islamist. He does. The question is whether an Islamist president has adopted one of February 28’s central authoritarian principles: organized religious power may exist only as long as it remains subordinate to the political state. The lead image above almost speaks for itself. It shows Alparslan Kuytul being escorted by police and his wife, Semra Kuytul, being taken into custody by a female police officer who herself wears a headscarf. The symbolism is striking. During the February 28 era and the late 1990s, Turkey repeatedly saw images of secular-looking female police officers, university officials and other female representatives of the state confronting, harassing, detaining or physically removing headscarved conservative women in the name of the secular order. Today, the image is almost the reverse: a headscarved female police officer is now the representative of state power taking another headscarved conservative woman into custody. The headscarf has changed sides of the police line, but the machinery of coercion has not disappeared. That reversal captures the transformation at the heart of Erdoğan’s Turkey: February 28 has not returned in its old secular appearance; some of its…