Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Education

Erdoğan graduated from Kasımpaşa Piyale Primary School in 1965, and the Istanbul İmam Hatip High School, a religious vocational high school, in 1973. The same educational path was followed by other co-founders of the AK Party. One quarter of the curriculum of İmam Hatip schools involves study of the Quran, the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and the Arabic language. Erdoğan studied the Quran at the İmam Hatip, where his classmates began calling him hoca ("teacher" or "religious official").

Erdoğan attended a meeting of the nationalist student group National Turkish Student Union (Milli Türk Talebe Birliği), who sought to raise a conservative cohort of young people to counter the rising movement of leftists in Turkey. Within the group, Erdoğan was distinguished by his oratorical skills, developing a penchant for public speaking and excelling in front of an audience. He won first place in a poetry-reading competition organized by the Community of Turkish Technical Painters, and began preparing for speeches through reading and research. Erdoğan would later comment on these competitions as "enhancing our courage to speak in front of the masses".

Erdoğan wanted to pursue advanced studies at the Ankara University Faculty of Political Science, commonly known as Mülkiye, but only students with regular high school diplomas were eligible to apply, thereby excluding Imam Hatip graduates. Mülkiye was known for its political science department, which trained many statesmen and politicians in Turkey. Erdoğan was then admitted to Eyüp High School, a regular state school. That he eventually received a high school diploma from this school is a subject of debate.

According to his official biography, Erdoğan subsequently studied business administration at the Aksaray School of Economics and Commercial Sciences (Turkish: Aksaray İktisat ve Ticaret Yüksekokulu), now known as Marmara University's Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. Both the authenticity and status of his degree have been the subject of disputes and controversy over whether the diploma is legitimate and ought to be considered sufficient to make him eligible as a candidate for the presidency.

Education

Erdoğan increased the budget of the Ministry of Education from 7.5 billion lira in 2002 to 34 billion lira in 2011, the highest share of the national budget given to one ministry. Before his prime ministership the military received the highest share of the national budget. Compulsory education was increased from eight years to twelve. In 2003, the Turkish government, together with UNICEF, initiated a campaign called "Come on girls, [let's go] to school!" (Turkish: Haydi Kızlar Okula!). The goal of this campaign was to close the gender gap in primary school enrollment through the provision of a quality basic education for all girls, especially in southeast Turkey.

In 2005, the parliament granted amnesty to students expelled from universities before 2003. The amnesty applied to students dismissed on academic or disciplinary grounds. In 2004, textbooks became free of charge and since 2008 every province in Turkey has its own university. During Erdoğan's Premiership, the number of universities in Turkey nearly doubled, from 98 in 2002 to 186 in October 2012.

The prime minister kept his campaign promises by starting the Fatih project in which all state schools, from preschool to high school level, received a total of 620,000 smart boards, while tablet computers were distributed to 17 million students and approximately one million teachers and administrators.

In June 2017 a draft proposal by the ministry of education was approved by Erdoğan, in which the curriculum for schools excluded the teaching of the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin by 2019. From then on the teaching will be postponed and start at undergraduate level.

Erdoğan married Emine Erdoğan (née Gülbaran; b. 1955, Siirt) on 4 July 1978. They have two sons, Ahmet Burak (b. 1979) and Necmettin Bilal (b. 1981), and two daughters, Esra (b. 1983) and Sümeyye (b. 1985). His father, Ahmet Erdoğan, died in 1988 and his mother, Tenzile Erdoğan, died in 2011 at the age of 87.

Erdoğan has a brother, Mustafa (b. 1958), and a sister, Vesile (b. 1965). From his father's first marriage to Havuli Erdoğan (d. 1980), he had two half-brothers: Mehmet (1926–1988) and Hasan (1929–2006).

Mayor of Istanbul (1994–1998)

In the local elections of 1994, Erdoğan ran as a candidate for Mayor of Istanbul. He was a young, dark horse candidate in a crowded field. Over the course of the campaign, he was mocked by the mainstream media and treated as a country bumpkin by his opponents. In an upset, he won with 25.19% of the popular vote, making it the first time a mayor of Istanbul got elected from his political party. His win coincided with a wave of Welfare Party victories nationwide, as they won 28 provincial mayoralties - most out of any party - and numerous metropolitan seats, including the capital, Ankara. He said at the time: "Democracy is like a train: when we reach our destination, we get off".

Erdoğan governed pragmatically, focusing on bread-and-butter issues. He aimed to tackle the chronic problems plaguing the metropolis, such as water shortage, pollution – waste collection issues in particular – and severely congested traffic. He undertook an infrastructure overhaul: expanding and modernizing the water grid with hundreds of kilometres of new water pipes being laid, and constructing more than fifty bridges, viaducts, and stretches of highway to mitigate traffic. State-of-the-art recycling facilities were built and air pollution was reduced through a plan to switch to natural gas. He changed the public buses to environmentally friendly ones. He took precautions to prevent corruption, using measures to ensure that municipal funds were used prudently. He paid back a major portion of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's two-billion-dollar debt and invested four billion dollars in the city. He also opened up City Hall to the people, gave out his e-mail address and established municipal hot lines.

Erdoğan initiated the first roundtable of mayors during the Istanbul conference, which led to a global, organized movement of mayors. A seven-member international jury from the United Nations unanimously awarded Erdoğan the UN-Habitat award.

Imprisonment

In December 1997 in Siirt, Erdoğan recited a modified version of the "Soldier's prayer" poem written by Ziya Gökalp, a pan-Turkish activist of the early 20th century. This version included an additional stanza in the beginning, its first two verses reading "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets / The minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...." Under article 312/2 of the Turkish penal code his recitation was regarded by the judge as an incitement to violence and religious or racial hatred. In his defence, Erdoğan said that the poem was published in state-approved books. How this version of the poem ended up in a book published by the Turkish Standards Institution remained a topic of discussion.

Erdoğan was given a ten-month prison sentence. He was forced to give up his mayoral position due to his conviction. The conviction also stipulated a political ban, which prevented him from participating in elections. He had appealed for the sentence to be converted to a monetary fine, but it was reduced to four months instead (24 March 1999 to 27 July 1999).

He was transferred to Pınarhisar prison in Kırklareli. The day Erdoğan went to prison, he released an album called This Song Doesn't End Here. The album features a tracklist of seven poems and became the best-selling album of Turkey in 1999, selling over one million copies. After his release, Erdoğan sought refuge in Tetovo, Macedonia with an ethnic Albanian family with whom he stayed with for several months.

In 2013, Erdoğan visited the Pınarhisar prison again for the first time in fourteen years. After the visit, he said "For me, Pınarhisar is a symbol of rebirth, where we prepared the establishment of the Justice and Development Party".

Justice and Development Party

Erdoğan was member of political parties that kept getting banned by the army or judges. Within his Virtue Party, there was a dispute about the appropriate discourse of the party between traditional politicians and pro-reform politicians. The latter envisioned a party that could operate within the limits of the system, and thus not getting banned as its predecessors like National Order Party, National Salvation Party and Welfare Party. They wanted to give the group the character of an ordinary conservative party with its members being Muslim Democrats following the example of the Europe's Christian Democrats.

When the Virtue Party was also banned in 2001, a definitive split took place: the followers of Necmettin Erbakan founded the Felicity Party (SP) and the reformers founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) under the leadership of Abdullah Gül and Erdoğan. The pro-reform politicians realized that a strictly Islamic party would never be accepted as a governing party by the state apparatus and they believed that an Islamic party did not appeal to more than about 20 percent of the Turkish electorate. The AK party emphatically placed itself as a broad democratic conservative party with new politicians from the political centre (like Ali Babacan and Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu), while respecting Islamic norms and values, but without an explicit religious program. This turned out to be successful as the new party won 34% of the vote in the general elections of 2002. Erdoğan became prime minister in March 2003 after the Gül government ended his political ban.