When World War I ended, Western – notably the British – colonial empires had invaded almost the whole of Muslim lands. The Western intellectuals and statesmen of the day must have thought that Islamic civilization was dead for good. Yet, the emergence of independent Muslim states in the 1950s and 1960s was followed by the polarization of Muslim countries in line with the bipolarity of the Cold War. Finally, the crisis of the global system post-Cold War coincided with the rise of densely populated Islamic countries.

The United Kingdom has had experience stirring internal dissent in the lands targeted by their colonial projects. Since their occupation of India, the U.K. developed a serious colonial experience, which came to rely on disturbing the ethnic, religious and denominational demography of the occupied country. The British colonial legacy has thus become the know-how of subsequent Western states and their intelligence organizations. As Muslim countries were resurrected from their ashes in the 1970s, the global colonial empire seems to be targeting Islamic civilization once again.

Through occupation, the global colonial empire aims at pacifying Muslim countries through two major methods: dragging them into the spiral of violence and pacifying Muslim populations.

In the sacred Quran and the Prophet Muhammad's sayings, the ummah is defined as a religious people acting with prudence, moderation and deliberateness. In his report presented to the U.S. president at the time, Arnold Toynbee claimed that the moderate ummah posed the real threat to Western civilization. Toynbee denominated the true vein of Islamic civilization as "the northern Islam who takes nourishment from an ancient tradition and madrasahs spreading from the Mausoleum of Khodja Ahmed Yasawi in southeastern Kazakhstan to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and who are prone to express their sentiments not through violence, but through their state apparatus." It is these moderate Muslims that the Western colonial empire aims at eliminating.

While Daesh is the monster of violence, the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) aspires to turn Islam, under the guise of supporting reconciliation and interreligious dialogue, into a Christian sect by abolishing the anti-colonial verses, sayings and culture within Islamic ethics. Therefore, it is not a surprise that their characteristics and ultimate aims are in accordance with each other:

l Both are essentially Western inventions.

l Both have no truly religious aims.

Both abuse Islam for their profane goals.

Both show no respect for the Islamic commands, verses, sayings and laws that contradict their political agenda.

While Daesh provokes Islamaphobia through the use of atrocious violence, FETÖ aims at rendering Islamic civilization a slave of Western civilization.

Both target Muslims rather than non-Muslims.

Both are systematically used by various intelligence organizations in their internal competition.

We are, therefore, facing two of the most complex terrorist organizations in the world. Except for its demographic structure, Daesh is a Western apparatus just like FETÖ, which has been used to degenerate Islam into a passive sect of Christianity. Thus, both render service to the same patron with suicide bombs on one side and religious sermons on the other. Unaware of their own reason for existence, the members of both terrorist organizations sacrifice themselves for the profane aims of foreign intelligence services.