To many outside observers struggling to make sense of Turkey, the most puzzling actors in the political scene are the Gulenists: the followers of cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. The group defines itself as a service movement dedicated to innocent goals such as education, charity and interfaith dialogue. In a bewildering contrast, however, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan defines the whole group as a “terrorist” network, calling it the “Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization” or “FETO.” It also claims that the group is behind almost every single trouble Turkey has faced in the past five years, from the failed coup in July 2016 and the murder of the Russian ambassador to Turkey to terrorism by the Kurdistan Workers Party and even the Islamic State.

Of course there is also a third view in Turkey, one critical of both the Erdogan government and the Gulenists. This view defines them as two Islamist powers that first used their alliance to capture the state from secularists, and then fell into a Machiavellian power struggle among themselves. Gulenists in this view are not the innocent victims they pretend to be, but neither are they a cosmic evil that explains away every misdeed by the government.

This third view was recently promoted by a group of young Turkish academics who were once members of the Gulenist community but apparently outgrew it. On a new website, www.kitalararasi.com (which means “intercontinental”), they have posted a series of articles that take a critical line against the Gulen community and even Gulen himself, breaking a long-standing taboo.

One of them is Ahmet Kuru, a professor of political science at San Diego State University. On Oct. 23, he posted an article titled “Leaders, Principles and the Problem with the Example of the Prophet.” The article, in line with the general tone of the website, is a reasoned critique of the common political culture in the Muslim world that calls for obedience to authority.