Turks have been hearing about a so-called parallel state since December 2013, when two concurrent corruption investigations targeted then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his son and various members of the government. The term, coined and popularized by Erdogan, insinuates that the Gulen community, Turkey's largest Islamic movement, has established a cabal with sinister intentions within the state bureaucracy, particularly in the police force and the judiciary. This therefore suggests that the corruption investigations were nothing more than “coup attempts” by the alleged parallel state.

This was initially just a political narrative adopted by the government and its supporters. Gradually, however, the judiciary began to answer the call to take on this supposed major threat to national security and its members. On Oct. 1, prosecutor Ismail Ucar submitted a 1,453-page indictment to a court. Like other indictments in politically driven cases in Turkey, this is a peculiar document, quite unlike any in the Western legal tradition.

The indictment begins with dry details about all the claimants, the accused and the relevant articles in the Turkish penal code on “coups” and “armed terror organizations.” There are 27 claimants, beginning with none other than Erdogan, along with his son, his son-in-law and all the ministers in the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Cabinet in December 2013. Heading the list of the 69 defendants is the Pennsylvania-based Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen — founder of the Gulen community — followed by police officers and others who allegedly took orders from Gulen to conduct a coup against the elected government.

The fun part of the text is the long introduction, in which the prosecutor offers his analysis of “political and sociological events” to highlight the problem at hand. For this, he goes all the way back to ancient Anatolia: “The states founded on this territory, such as [those of the] Hittites, Lydians, Romans, the Seldjuks and the Ottomans, have always been definitive in world events. It is only Turkey that exists on the same land that has not been able to play an influential role. This is despite the fact that Turkey has the potential to be a great power. This is a known fact.”