Writing in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Turkey Notebook, Abbas Djavadi explores the deceitful operations of Gülenist schools in Turkey by talking to a former pupil:

In the mid-1990s, Aygul attended one of the hundreds of “Gulen schools” that were established throughout Turkey by the unregistered network of Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish cleric who has lived in exile in the United States since 1999 and is at the center of an extradition wrangle.

The schools — which were said to have been funded by sympathetic businessmen and other, undisclosed sources — were part of Gulen’s stated effort to build a “golden generation,” one aggressively pursuing educations in the natural sciences and foreign languages and also committed to Islam and “Turkish national objectives.”

After a while, Aygul’s parents started to see changes in her behavior: wearing the Islamic head scarf, praying regularly, refusing handshakes with men. Her mother feared that her daughter was “being brainwashed in school as well as in those lengthy after-school hours.”

I asked Aygul about her feelings and whether she was pleased that she had left the Gulen school after two years.

“Yes,” she said, “especially after finding out that, as you know, they kept stealing the university and government employment exams’ questions to [elevate] their sympathizers in the government ladder.” She was referring to a scandal in 2010 in which so-called Gulenists in higher education and the government-placement bureaucracy were accused of providing other Gulen supporters access to exam questions in advance.

Aygul’s father chimed in, saying: “Not only illegal; it is also against any religion’s principles, while they claim to be the true faithful.”

Full article available here.