The First Forum Program After His Release
Fact
The period under discussion is this: on 30 January 2018 an operation was carried out against the Furkan Foundation, Alparslan Kuytul was arrested on 8 February 2018, and 22 months later, on 5 December 2019, he was released. The program on this page took place eight days after the release — on Friday, 13 December 2019.
The program was not a conference but took a forum format: Kuytul answered the questions put to him. The questions ranged from what he had experienced in prison to the court process. He also spoke here about the letters written to him throughout his detention.
The source report relates that the prison memories he recounted led to both smiles and emotional moments in the hall. At the end of the program Kuytul was seen off with the slogans "Tawhid", "Justice", "Freedom" and "Civilization".
The program was also broadcast live; the full recording is in the video on this page. The photographs below belong to the same program.
Other content from the same days: the 14 months spent in solitary confinement, the three items he listed as the reason for his arrest and his answer to the question of being arrested again.
Eight days earlier he was in prison
When the dates are placed side by side, the subject of this page becomes more visible. Alparslan Kuytul was arrested on 8 February 2018 and released on Thursday, 5 December 2019. This forum program, meanwhile, took place on Friday, 13 December 2019 — that is, only eight days after the release.
A few other stops had come in between: on the day of his release he took part in an interview program, and afterwards he went to Istanbul. The forum was the first program of this kind he attended after his release.
The source report gives the atmosphere of those days in a single sentence: his home was flooded with visitors and never stood empty. The crowd in the program's hall may be counted as a continuation of this — it was the first question-and-answer program of someone who had been released eight days earlier.
What was discussed in the program?
The format was question and answer. According to the source report, the questions spread over a wide area, from what he had experienced in prison to the court process. Kuytul also spoke about the letters written to him throughout his detention. The weight of this topic becomes easier to understand once one remembers that 14 months of that detention were spent alone in a room for three.
The prison memories he recounted met with two kinds of response in the hall: in the words of the report, at times they brought smiles, at times they led to emotional moments.
The hall and the crowd
The photographs show the scale of the program: the hall is full from the front of the stage to the back wall, and there are people left standing. Nor does the audience consist of a single age group — children in the front rows, young people and the elderly in the same frame.
The banner behind the stage carries this phrase: "25 Spotless Years Spent in the Struggle for Tawhid and Justice". On the same backdrop the words "Faith", "Worship", "Morality" and "Jihad" are repeated.
How did the program end?
The source report conveys the closing of the program in a single sentence: Kuytul was seen off from the hall with the slogans "Tawhid", "Justice", "Freedom" and "Civilization". Two of these four words also stand on the stage banner mentioned above.
What this page gives and what it does not
The text here is not a summary of the program. Because the source report does not write which answer was given to which question, there is no quotation from the program on this page either; the actual record is the video, and it is published in full. The task of the page is to place that recording in its date and its context.
The date side matters, because this program belongs to only eight days after the release. The answers he gave in the other programs of the same week can be found on the pages the question of being arrested again and the measure of injustice.
Everything on this page belongs to the 2018–2019 detention and its immediate aftermath. Today there is a separate and ongoing judicial process; none of the information here concerns that process.