Word: erdogan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Turkish politician Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not look like a man so dangerous as to have been accused of "inciting religious hatred." His comfortably furnished offices in Ankara look more like a banker's suite than a fundamentalist's den. Impressionist prints adorn the walls, along with a portrait of Turkey's fiercely secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. There isn't a prayer bead in sight. "I am a Muslim," the beardless Erdogan, 48, dressed in a pressed blue suit and red tie, said in a recent interview with Time. "But I believe in a secularist state...
...claims. But the dramatic victory last week by Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.)--which won nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Turkish parliament--has sharpened the focus on a sometimes inscrutable leader. In a country where mixing religion and politics can be a treasonable offense, Erdogan has tested the line dividing acceptable fervor from revolution. His background--he is a onetime Islamic youth activist who sent his own children to study in the U.S.--mirrors a broader contradiction in Turkish society. "He is about to show us," said one senior Western diplomat, "what Islamic politics means...
...Though Erdogan is positioned to be the focus of power in the new government, under current laws he cannot become Prime Minister. At a rally in 1997, he read a poem: "The minarets are our bayonets. The faithful are our soldiers. God is great. God is great." For that flight of fancy, which he says was meant metaphorically, he was sentenced under laws designed to keep Islamic fundamentalism at bay. He served four months in prison and was barred for life from public office. Nonetheless, his party swept to victory, partly as a protest against Turkey's Old Guard politicians...
Born into a working-class family on Turkey's Black Sea coast, Erdogan moved at age 13 to Istanbul, where he joined the youth wing of a party founded by Necmettin Erbakan, architect of Turkey's political Islamic movement. Erbakan, who later briefly became Prime Minister, saw in the tall young soccer fanatic an ambitious orator of considerable charm...
...Recep Tayyip Erdogan should not even be in politics. In 1998, the charismatic former mayor of Istanbul was convicted under Turkey's religious-hate-speech statutes for reciting a poem that contained the lines: "Our minarets are our bayonets, our believers are our soldiers." He served four months in jail and was banned from public office for life. Yet last week the clean-cut populist was back. His pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AK) drubbed Turkey's secular old guard in the general election, amassing nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament - albeit with only one-third...