Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby

have helped to make him a charismatic figure for many and an object of suspicion for
others. He came of political age within the Turkish Islamist movement, which had long
struggled to achieve influence within Turkey's secular political order. In the early 1990s,
the young Erdogan was an Islamist politician in Istanbul, rising to become a successful
mayor of the city who addressed practical problems of sanitation, water, and traffic
congestion. He was then a junior member of an earlier Islamist party that had ruled
briefly but was overthrown by a secular, military-led coup in 1998 that constituted yet
another defeat for the Islamist movement. Erdogan himself was jailed for the offense of
citing a militant Islamist poem.
Then, in 2001, he formed the Justice and Development Party, known ever since by its
Turkish acronym AKP. His rise since has been spectacular. His party has won three
successive parliamentary victories (in 2002, 2007, and 2011) with ever-increasing
margins--an unprecedented political achievement in Turkey's republican history. During
this period Turkey's economic growth has been extraordinary by historic standards.
Ever mindful of the obstacles that his Islamist roots faced in Turkey's secular order,
Erdogan has worked over his last decade in power steadily-but also cautiously,
especially early on—to eliminate Ataturk-inspired restrictions on Islam and to undercut
the old judicial and military order that guarded against the Islamization of Turkey. In this,
too, he has been spectacularly successful, surmounting the obstacles that had stymied
his early Islamist movement mentors.
But was his success in this regard simply a continuation of his earlier Islamist
commitments? Many in the West were initially inclined to say no. For Erdogan's early
political reforms were advanced not in the name of Islam, but in the name of an
essential and necessary "democratic" reform of the abiding authoritarian features of the
Turkish state, and were proffered as the means to satisfy EU requirements for
membership. As a result, many admirers of Erdogan argued that he had abandoned the
Islamist convictions of his youth and now merely aimed to liberate traditionally religious
Turks from the constraints and even discrimination to which they were subject under
Ataturk's secular order.
More generally, Erdogan was deemed to have found the way to reconcile democracy
with Islam and so overcome the conflicts thought to bedevil Muslim progress, including
economic progress, in the modern world. This earned him great respect well beyond the
world of Turkish politics. President Obama declared that Erdogan was one of five world
MARCH/APRIL 2013
43