"Prime Minister Erdogan: Turkey's Man of The People
By Rana Foroohar Monday, June 27, 2011
You could call it poetic justice. Back in 1999, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then an up-and-coming young mayor of Istanbul with populist appeal and Islamist leanings, was sentenced to 10 months in jail for reciting a century-old poem that the country's generals — the enforcers of Turkey's constitutionally mandated secularism — found offensive. 'Minarets are our bayonets,' the poem went, 'the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks, and the believers our army.' Erdogan was packed away for inciting religious hatred, but not before shouting that 'this song is not yet over.'"
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