The Gulenist Business Cycle
Told by the sources

The AKP and Gulen movement recognize the lack of space for competition with the Western-oriented trade markets ruled by Koc, Sabanci and the other secularist business elites. Instead, the Islamist forces have created their own business model, one that speaks for Anatolia and focuses on accessing markets in places like the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region.

The drivers behind this business campaign are Turkey's Independent Industrialists and Businessmen's Association (MUSIAD) and Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists (TUSKON), made up of thousands of small and medium-sized business owners. TUSKON has existed for just five years, but is slowly emerging as an alternative to the larger, and more well-established business associations like Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association (TUSIAD), which represent big-name firms like Sabanci, Koc and Dogan (and, which as expected, support the
secularists).

As opposed to the Istanbul-entrenched secularist corporations, most businessmen who belong to TUSKON and MUSIAD hail from small, generally poorer and religiously conservative towns and cities across Anatolia. TUSKON is tightly linked into the Gulen movement and forms an integral part of the Gulenist business, education, political and even foreign intelligence agenda.

The business association organizes massive business conferences in various parts of the globe attended by high-level AKP
officials that aim to bring hundreds of Turkish businessmen into contact with their foreign counterparts. While there are variations to how the Gulenist business cycle works, the following is a basic example:

A small-business owner from the eastern Anatolian city of Gaziantep makes a living manufacturing and selling shirt buttons.
A Gulenist invites the buttonmaker to a TUSKON business conference in Africa, where he will be put into contact with a shirtmaker from Tanzania who will buy his buttons. The Turkish buttonmaker and the Tanzanian shirtmaker are then incorporated into a broader supply chain that provides both with business across continents, wherever the Gulenists operate.

In short, the Anatolian buttonmaker can expand his business tenfold or more if he belongs to the Gulenist network. In return, the Gulen movement will ask the buttonmaker to provide financial support for the development of Gulenist programs and schools in Tanzania. The end result is a well-oiled and well-financed business and education network spanning 115 countries across the globe. Not only do these business links translate into votes when elections roll around, they also (along with the schools) form the backbone of the AKP's soft power strategy in the foreign policy sphere.

Source