Religious communities rarely survive major political ruptures unchanged. They endure by carrying an old moral world into new institutions. The Süleymancılar are among the clearest examples of this process in modern Turkey. They emerged from the Naqshbandi tradition, but they cannot be understood simply as another Sufi order gathered around a sheik and a lodge. Their distinctive achievement was to make religious education the central instrument of collective survival. Qur’an courses, student dormitories, teachers, associations, foundations, publishing houses, and later European networks replaced the institutions destroyed or restricted by the early Republic. This educational system gave the community both its strength and its independence. It also helps explain why the Süleymancılar have become a target of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly personalized state.
The movement takes its name from Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan, an Ottoman-trained scholar born in 1888 in the Silistre region of Bulgaria. He belonged to the last generation formed by the Ottoman medrese system. The Republic’s unification of education, closure of the medreses, and prohibition of the Sufi lodges dismantled the institutional world in which men like Tunahan had acquired and transmitted religious knowledge. For many religious scholars, this was not simply a change in government policy. It created the possibility that the chain of Islamic learning itself might be broken.
Tunahan responded not by organizing a rebellion or trying to recreate the Ottoman order, but by making religious instruction portable. Teaching could take place in a mosque, a private home, a shop, a warehouse, or any other available room. If the state closed one institutional door, knowledge would pass through another. His followers often describe his aim as leaving behind “living books”: students who could read, teach, and train the next generation. This expression captures the movement’s deepest conviction. Buildings may be closed, and books may be confiscated, but knowledge embodied in disciplined teachers can move, adapt, and reproduce itself.
The Süleymancılar remain part of the Sunni, Hanafi, Maturidi, and Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi tradition. They accept the importance of spiritual lineage, silent remembrance of God, sohbet, rabıta, moral discipline, and conformity to the sharia. They did not create a new theology or claim to possess a new revelation. Their distinctiveness lies less in doctrine than in institutional emphasis. What they changed was the social form through which inherited doctrine would be preserved.
For the Süleymancılar, religious education is not one activity among many; it is their central mission, and they insist that it should be provided without payment or salary. Therefore, they reject the state’s role in religion and religious education. In their courses, they begin with Qur’anic literacy and recitation but traditionally extend to Arabic grammar, Hanafi jurisprudence, Maturidi creed, devotional works, and selected hadith texts. The larger purpose is to form habits of worship, moral restraint, respect for teachers, and commitment to preserving sacred knowledge.
The dormitory is just as important as the classroom. It brings together religious instruction, housing, food, friendship, supervision, and preparation for public education. For families from villages, small towns, or poor urban neighborhoods, these residences have made education possible when the state or the market offered few affordable alternatives. A student could attend a secular school or university while living in an environment the family regarded as morally safe. The community thus turned religious education into a route of social mobility. It did not simply preserve piety against modernity; it helped conservative families enter modern society on terms they could accept.
This emphasis separates the Süleymancılar from other branches of the Turkish Naqshbandi world. The İskenderpaşa community became known for its mosque-centered sohbet circles, educated professionals, and role in producing the political cadres of the National Outlook tradition. Erenköy developed through urban merchants, charitable networks, and cultivated forms of piety. İsmailağa placed greater emphasis on the neighborhood medrese, the authority of scholars, and the visible imitation of the Prophet’s way of life. Menzil developed mass devotion around a living sheik and a village-centered sacred geography visited by followers from across the country. Almost all these Naksibendi orders act as Erdogan’s agents and cooperate closely with Erdogan’s government.
The Süleymancılar built a different center of gravity. They stress autonomy from the state and insist on religious education outside state control. Their characteristic institution is the course and dormitory; their characteristic organizer is the teacher-administrator. A Süleymancı teacher can enter a new town, gather students, find a building, organize donations, and reproduce a recognizable curriculum. This makes the community mobile, standardized, and difficult to reduce to a single lodge. Other Naqshbandi groups also educate students and run charities, but among the Süleymancılar education is the main mechanism through which religious authority, collective memory, and organizational identity are reproduced.
Their autonomy is educational before it is political. The Süleymancılar have supported various center-right parties and have sometimes placed figures in parliament, but they have not generally treated capturing the state as their primary religious objective. Political relations were useful when they protected courses, dormitories, property, and the right to teach. The movement could bargain with parties without allowing any party to become the final interpreter of Islam. This distinction is crucial. The Süleymancılar do not seek isolation from the state; they seek room to reproduce their religious world without surrendering it to the state.
Süleymancılar: Tarikat or Cemaat?
The Suleymancis are more of a cemaat than a tarikat. This history also clarifies the difference between a tarikat and a cemaat. A tarikat is first of all a spiritual path. It is organized around a chain of authorized teachers, a master-disciple relationship, and practices intended to discipline the self and bring the believer closer to God. Its language is the language of spiritual formation: purification, remembrance, companionship, obedience, and moral transformation.
A cemaat is broader. It is a social community organized around shared beliefs, institutions, services, leadership, and a sense of collective belonging. A tarikat may produce a cemaat around itself, but not every cemaat is a classical Sufi order. In contemporary Turkey, most important religious formations combine the two. They inherit the sacred authority of a tarikat but operate through the modern instruments of a cemaat: foundations, associations, dormitories, businesses, media organizations, charities, and transnational networks.
The difference can be stated simply. The tarikat offers a path to spiritual cultivation; the cemaat organizes a social world in which that path can be lived. The tarikat asks how the individual soul should be transformed. The cemaat also asks where the believer will live, study, work, marry, find friends, and obtain help in moments of need. This is why modern religious communities cannot be explained by theology alone. People join and remain because belief is woven together with trust, opportunity, protection, affection, and daily life.
The cemaat is not a remnant left behind by modernity. It is itself a modern form of organization. Urbanization separated millions from villages and extended families; mass education sent young people into unfamiliar cities; capitalism produced opportunity along with insecurity. Where the bureaucratic state failed to provide belonging, affordable housing, or reliable care, the cemaat reconstructed solidarity. It carried the warmth of community into the cold structures of modern society.
This explains why the Süleymancı dormitory has been so effective. It feeds the student, teaches him or her, provides friends and contacts, imposes a schedule, and offers a moral vocabulary for understanding the world. It can turn religious trust into education, education into professional advancement, and professional success into donations that support new students. The result is a self-reproducing network in which sacred commitment and material resources strengthen each other.
The same structure can protect and constrain. For a poor student, the cemaat may provide a clean bed, a warm meal, a serious teacher, and a path to university. Yet it may also demand obedience and make departure costly when housing, friendships, employment, and family approval depend on the same network. A democratic society should therefore protect religious association while requiring financial transparency, child protection, independent inspection, and a genuine freedom to leave.
Erdoğan, Cooptation, and the Criminalization of Religious Autonomy
The relationship between the Süleymancılar and the Erdoğan regime reveals a major transformation in the politics of Islam in Turkey. During much of the twentieth century, autonomous religious communities struggled primarily against a secular state that sought to restrict their institutions, regulate religious education, and confine Islam to boundaries defined by the Republic. Under Erdoğan, the problem has changed. The state no longer seeks simply to marginalize Sunni Islam. Rather, it increasingly seeks to organize, supervise, incorporate, and politically subordinate autonomous Sunni religious networks. The central conflict is therefore no longer adequately captured by the familiar opposition between Islam and secularism. It increasingly concerns the relationship between state-centered Islam and autonomous religious authority.
This distinction is indispensable for understanding the recent targeting of the Süleymancılar and the August 2026 arrest of their leader, Alihan Kuriş. An Ankara-based investigation resulted in Kuriş and thirty-one others being jailed pending trial. Prosecutors have presented the investigation in conventional criminal terms, alleging the existence of a criminal organization as well as financial offenses involving fraud, money laundering, and taxation. The judicial allegations must be evaluated on their evidence and should not simply be dismissed. Yet treating the operation exclusively as a financial-criminal investigation would remove it from the political environment in which it occurred.
The issue was not theological opposition to Sunni conservatism. It was institutional autonomy. As Erdoğan’s rule became increasingly personalized, religious communities faced a choice that earlier conservative governments had rarely imposed so starkly: support the governing bloc and accept integration into its patronage and political networks, or preserve independent organizational authority at the risk of becoming politically suspect.
Thus, the conflict should not be interpreted simply as a dispute between Erdoğan and another conservative Muslim leader. It reflects a deeper struggle over who has the right to organize Islam independently of the state. In Erdoğan’s political order, autonomous social organizations can become threatening precisely because their loyalties are not completely transferable to the political center. A religious community possessing its own schools, dormitories, businessmen, donors, social networks, transnational institutions, and millions of potential sympathizers represents a social constituency that the state does not fully command.
From this perspective, the Süleymancı case illustrates the transformation of Erdoğan’s relationship with religious civil society. The AKP originally rose partly through the social spaces created by Islamic cemaatler, foundations, business associations, Sufi networks, and conservative civil society. These organizations supplied voters, activists, economic resources, and moral legitimacy. Yet the consolidation of Erdoğan’s personalized presidential system gradually altered this relationship. Autonomous religious groups were increasingly valued for their willingness to align with the political center.
Erdoğan’s system may be described as a şahsım devleti: a personalized state in which institutions, patronage, coercion, and public legitimacy increasingly revolve around the ruler himself. In such a system, neutrality is rarely enough. Organized groups are expected not only to obey the law but also to demonstrate political loyalty. Their leaders must praise the president, mobilize members when needed, and avoid creating an alternative center of trust. The issue is no longer whether a community is religious. The issue is whether its religion confirms Erdoğan’s primacy.
The AKP originally benefited from the schools, dormitories, charities, and social networks built by religious communities. Once Erdoğan consolidated power, however, autonomous allies became potential rivals. A large cemaat possesses donors, buildings, companies, teachers, and followers whose loyalty cannot automatically be transferred to the president. The struggle with the Gülen movement taught Erdoğan a sweeping lesson: no independent religious network should again accumulate power beyond his control.
The Süleymancılar present a quieter but still important challenge. Their power does not primarily come from control of the police, judiciary, or bureaucracy. It comes from education. They shape young people before they enter public life. They provide a religious identity that does not depend on Erdoğan, the AKP, or the Directorate of Religious Affairs. Their members may vote for the government, but the president does not own their loyalty. For a personalized regime, even this limited autonomy can appear suspicious.
Independent Muslim criticism is especially dangerous to Erdoğan’s claim of Islamic legitimacy. Secular critics can be dismissed before conservative audiences as enemies of religion. A Sunni community cannot be dismissed so easily. When the Süleymancılar refuse to treat Erdoğan as the natural leader of all pious Muslims, they expose the difference between loyalty to Islam and loyalty to a ruler. They do not need to issue a detailed theological condemnation. Their simple insistence that religious education and spiritual authority should remain outside presidential command already limits Erdoğan’s claim to embody the Muslim nation.
It would be premature to claim as an established fact that Erdoğan has already decided to confiscate all Süleymancı property and distribute it among loyal groups. But the suspicion is not unreasonable. After the destruction of the Gülen movement, confiscated institutions and opportunities were often transferred to organizations aligned with the government. Erdoğan-linked foundations have expanded into youth education, dormitories, scholarships, and religious socialization—the very spaces long occupied by independent cemaats. The pattern suggests a political strategy: punish autonomous networks, reward obedient ones, and make access to religious resources dependent upon presidential favor.
Erdoğan therefore targets the Süleymancılar not because they are insufficiently Islamic, but because their Islam is not fully his to command. He wants religious communities to function as extensions of the regime, not as independent moral authorities capable of judging it. He does not welcome religious criticism of corruption, injustice, or the gap between Islamic language and political conduct, because such criticism strikes at the foundation of his legitimacy. The şahsım devleti can tolerate many forms of piety, but it has difficulty tolerating a piety that refuses personal submission.
The struggle over the Süleymancılar reveals a larger transformation of Turkey’s religious landscape. Under the old secular order, the state often told organized religion to retreat from public life. Under Erdoğan, the state gives Sunni Islam unprecedented visibility while narrowing its independence. Mosques, religious schools, foundations, and Islamic symbols proliferate, yet religious pluralism within the Sunni field contracts. The goal is not the disappearance of religion but its concentration under political supervision.
The Süleymancılar survived the early Republic because they learned how to preserve sacred knowledge without possessing the state. Their courses turned rooms into schools and students into living books. Today they face a different challenge. The state no longer simply threatens religious education from outside; it seeks to absorb it from within. The conflict is therefore about more than one cemaat, one criminal investigation, or one collection of properties. It concerns whether Muslim citizens may build religious institutions that are neither enemies of the state nor servants of the ruler. Erdoğan’s message is increasingly clear: Islam may remain public, powerful, and wealthy—but only if it speaks in his voice.
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