It is institutionalized in 180 countries through educational institutions as well as media outlets, finance companies, for-profit health clinics, and affiliated foundations that have a combined net worth in the range of 20–50 billion dollars as of 2015.

The movement was previously led by the Islamic preacher Hoca Fethullah Gülen, who left Turkey in 1999 after being threatened by lawsuits and settled in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.

The Gülen movement was included in the declaration in the trilateral memorandum signed by Turkey, Finland and Sweden during the NATO summit in Madrid on 28 June 2022, but did not define it as a terrorist organization.

The prosecutor for the case, Ferhat Sarıkaya, prepared a criminal indictment in which Turkey's Commander of Land Forces, Yaşar Büyükanıt, was accused of forming a gang and plotting the bombing.

Hakan Bakırcıoglu, one of Hrant Dink's lawyers, said in an interview with Deutsche Welle that the under-aged perpetrator, Ogün Samast, had help from third parties, including people connected to the Istanbul and Trabzon police forces.

Furthermore, police commissioners Ramazan Akyürek and Ali Fuat Yılmazer were accused of not sharing their foreknowledge of the attack with the prosecutors, the gendarmerie, or the intelligence services despite being briefed of a planned assassination several times.

[38] Questions have arisen about the Gülen movement's possible involvement in the Ergenekon investigation,[39] which critics characterized as "a pretext" by the government "to neutralize dissidents" in Turkey.

[42] The Gülen movement has also been implicated in what the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) has said were illegal court decisions against members of the Turkish military, including many during the Ergenekon investigation.

In March 2011, seven Turkish journalists were arrested, including Ahmet Şık, who had been writing a book, "Imamin Ordusu" (The Imam's Army),[44] which states that the Gülen movement has infiltrated the country's security forces.

[46] In a reply, Abdullah Bozkurt, from the Gülen aligned newspaper Today's Zaman, said Ahmet Şık was not an investigative journalist conducting "independent research", but was hatching "a plot designed and put into action by the terrorist network itself".

The US State Department cautioned Turkey to not violate its "own democratic foundations" while drawing attention to the raids against media outlets "openly critical of the current Turkish government".

On 20 January 2015, Turkish police launched raids in Ankara and three other cities, detaining some 20 people suspected of illegally eavesdropping on President Erdoğan and other senior officials.

[59] On 15 April 2016, during the Kurdish–Turkish conflict according to the testimony of his companions Gülen movement member Brigadier General Ali Osman Gürcan deliberately sent 17 soldiers to a house that was packed with IEDs.

[60] Since the 2016 coup attempt, authorities arrested or imprisoned more than 90,000 Turkish citizens and closed more than 1,500 nongovernmental organizations, primarily for alleged ties to the Gülen movement.

[64] Finland and Sweden, which applied for NATO membership in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in May 2022, rejected Turkey's applications for the extradition of many Gülen movement and PKK members.

The number of abductions and the countries are: Azerbaijan (8),[73][74] Bahrain (1), Bulgaria (1), Gabon (3),[75] Indonesia (1), Kazakhstan (2), Kenya (1),[76] Kosovo (6),[77] Kyrgyzstan (1),[78] Lebanon (1), Malaysia (11), Moldova (7),[79] Myanmar (1), Pakistan (4), Saudi Arabia (16), Sudan (1), Ukraine (3).

[31] In 2018, in a conference with Turkish President Erdoğan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany needed more evidence to classify the Gülen movement as a terrorist organization.

Gülen has met with leaders of other religions, including Pope John Paul II, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and Israeli Sephardic Head Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron.

David Tittensor wrote, "[Detractors] have labeled Gülen community members as secretive missionaries, while those in the Movement and sympathetic observers class it as a civil society organization".

[109] The Gülen movement works within the given structures of modern secular states; it encourages affiliated members to maximize the opportunities those countries afford rather than engaging in subversive activities.

A further academic study sketched a portrait of a socially conservative, inwardly directed movement with an opaque organizational structure, but said that its members tend to be highly successful in society and thus form no threat to integration.

[114] According to academic researcher Svante E. Cornell, director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, "With only slight exaggeration, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) as well as the government it has led could be termed a coalition of religious orders.

The article said pupils attending the "cults" schools in Germany were under immense pressure from their abi's (tutors) who were telling them which books to read, which movies to watch, which friends to meet and whether to see their families or not.

[113] Its members have founded schools, universities, an employers' association, charities, real estate trusts, student organizations, radio and television stations, and newspapers.

[129][130] Later reporting by the Wall Street Journal estimated around 150 schools just in the United States, "ranging from networks in Texas, Illinois and Florida to stand-alone academies in Maryland".

[131][135] Alp Aslandoğan, director of the Alliance for Shared Values said that the schools are independent yet indirectly tied to the Gülen movement on the "intellectual or inspirational level.

In Georgia, the Georgian Labour Party protested schools opening on the basis that they "aim to spread Turkish culture and fundamentalist religious ideas".

[138][139] In America there have been allegations and investigations into money-laundering and kickbacks at charter schools connected to the Gülen movement which receive federal financial support.

[132] Folwell Dunbar, an official at the Louisiana Department of Education, accused Inci Akpinar, vice president of one such construction company, of offering him a $25,000 bribe to keep quiet about troubling conditions at the Abramson Science and Technology School in New Orleans which was operated by the Pelican Foundation.

[140] Movement members have set up a number of media organizations to promote its core values such as love, tolerance, hope, dialogue, activism, mutual acceptance and respect.