Erdogan Born: Turkey's Dominant and Divisive Leader

Recep Tayyip Erdogan was banned from politics in 1998 for reciting a poem deemed to incite religious hatred. The ban was supposed to end his career. Born on February 26, 1954, in the Kasimpasa neighborhood of Istanbul, a working-class district on the European side of the city, Erdogan grew up selling simit and lemonade on the streets to supplement his family's income. He attended an imam hatip religious school and studied economics and management at Marmara University. He entered politics through the Islamist Welfare Party, rising to become mayor of Istanbul in 1994. His four-year tenure was widely praised for improving the city's water supply, waste management, and transportation infrastructure. Then came the poem. At a rally in Siirt in December 1997, Erdogan recited verses by the Turkish nationalist poet Ziya Gokalp: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers." The poem was in the official school curriculum at the time. Erdogan was convicted of inciting religious hatred, sentenced to ten months in prison, and banned from holding political office. He served four months. The ban was widely seen as politically motivated by the secular military establishment. After his release, he co-founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001. The party won a parliamentary majority in its first election in 2002. Erdogan couldn't become prime minister immediately because of his political ban, so his ally Abdullah Gül served briefly until the constitution was amended. Erdogan took office in March 2003 and has been running Turkey since, first as prime minister and then as president after constitutional changes concentrated executive power in 2017.