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Erbakan was born in Sinop, a town in northern Turkey on the Black Sea,
in 1926. He was the son of one of the last Islamic judges of the Ottoman
Empire, whose system of religious courts was replaced by a secular legal
code after the founding of modern Turkey in 1923. The future political
leader received degrees in mechanical engineering from Istanbul Technical
University, where he later taught, and the Rhenish-Westphalian Technical
University of Aachen, then in West Germany. Elected to the legislature
as an independent in 1969, the next year he formed an Islamic party, but
it was banned by the military government in 1971. He re-formed the party
in 1972 and twice during the 1970s served as a deputy prime minister.
In 1980 the military again banned his party and briefly put Erbakan in
prison. He was prohibited from engaging in politics from 1980 to 1987.
His third attempt to form a political party was more successful, and the
Welfare Party became especially well organized on the local level, where
it opposed what many saw as the arrogant corruption of the leaders of
the established parties. In the 1995 campaign Erbakan advocated withdrawing
from NATO, abrogating agreements with Israel, and developing closer ties
with such Middle Eastern nations as Syria and Iran. His proposals were
particularly unsettling to Western leaders, who had long depended on a
friendly secular government in Turkey as a basis for their policy in the
Middle East.
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