Word: erdogan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...shape a government. Apart from what's left of the D.S.P., they include its right-wing coalition partners, the Nationalist Action Party and the Motherland Party. On the opposition side are the center-right True Path Party and Justice and Development, led by former Istanbul Mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan and suspected by the military of having a worrying Islamist agenda. With Turkey in such a political and economic mess, and its stability resting on the NATO-E.U.-IMF tripod, Cem's new movement appears well placed to attract the talent necessary to lead the country into the post-Ecevit...
...These days Erdogan chooses his words carefully. He no longer talks of minarets and bayonets but of "making moral values a pillar of modern administration."; The Islamic rhetoric of seven years ago is gone. He presents demands, like permission for women to wear Islamic headscarves at universities, not as threats to the secular state but as basic rights. Even so, a Turkish establishment that includes the army still suspects his moderation is just fa?ade. Other critics say he's too provincial to reform Turkey and lead it into the E.U. His reply, still to be tested, is that...