Necmettin Erbakan

Necmettin Erbakan (29 October 1926 – 27 February 2011) was a Turkish engineer and politician who served as the 23rd prime minister of Turkey from 1996 to 1997. He was pressured by the military to step down as prime minister and was later banned from politics by the Constitutional Court of Turkey for purportedly violating the separation of religion and state mandated by the constitution. ^{1 2}

Erbakan founded the Millî Görüş (National Outlook) movement, whose ideology argues that Turkey can develop with its own power by protecting its religious values and moving forward faster by rivaling Western countries in favour of closer relations with Muslim countries. With that ideology he was the founder and leader of a series of prominent Islamic political parties in Turkey from the 1970s to the 2010s: the National Order Party, the National Salvation Party, the Welfare Party, the Virtue Party and the Felicity Party. ¹

Erbakan was born in Sinop, on the Black Sea coast in northern Turkey. His father, Mehmet Sabri, was a judge from the prominent Kozanoğlu family of Cilicia, and his mother Kamer was a Circassian from a known family in Sinop and Mehmet Sabri's second wife. ^{1 2}

After high school at Istanbul High School, he graduated from the Mechanical Engineering Faculty of Istanbul Technical University in 1948 and received a PhD in engine engineering from RWTH Aachen University. While continuing his academic career in Germany, he worked in the research and development department at the Deutz AG factories and participated in a study on the engines of the Leopard tanks made for the German Army. ¹

After returning to Turkey, Erbakan became a lecturer at the Technical University and was appointed professor at the same university in 1965. After working in leading positions in industry, he switched to politics. He was a member of the Community of İskenderpaşa, a Turkish Sufi community of the Naqshbandi order. ¹ The Arabic article adds that he founded, with some three hundred colleagues, the "Silver Engine" factory specialising in diesel engines, whose production began in 1960. ²

Erbakan was elected deputy of Konya in 1969 and founded the National Order Party in 1970 with the support of an alliance of his community with the Nur movement; the Arabic article describes his party as the first political organisation with an Islamic identity in the modern Turkish state since the abolition of the caliphate in 1924. The party survived only nine months before being dissolved by a Constitutional Court decision. ^{1 2}

He then founded the National Salvation Party in 1972. At its peak the party served in coalition government with the Republican People's Party of Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, and Erbakan was deputy prime minister and took part in the decision to intervene in Cyprus in 1974. ^{2 1}

In the wake of the 1980 military coup, Erbakan and his party were banned from politics. He re-emerged following a referendum to lift the ban in 1987 and became leader of the Welfare Party. His party benefited in the 1990s from the acrimony between the leaders of Turkey's two most prominent conservative parties, Mesut Yılmaz and Tansu Çiller, and he led it to a surprise success in the general elections of 1995. ¹

After the short premiership of Mesut Yılmaz following the 1995 elections collapsed in 1996, Erbakan became prime minister in coalition with Çiller's True Path Party. As prime minister he attempted to further Turkey's relations with the Arab nations, to follow an economic welfare programme, and to implement a multi-dimensional approach to relations with neighbouring countries. ¹

His coalition government received criticism for his foreign policy: when he went on an African tour visiting Egypt, Nigeria and Libya, his passiveness toward Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's reprimands angered even his own constituents at home. Erbakan suggested an Islamic security organisation to rival NATO and an Islamic currency called the dinar, and the alarmed military established an initiative called the "Western Working Group" tasked with monitoring his party's activities. ¹

The Turkish military gradually raised tensions and issued many public warnings to his government, eventually prompting Erbakan to step down in 1997. Under a rotation deal he was to hand over to Çiller, but when he stepped down President Süleyman Demirel instead asked Mesut Yılmaz, leader of the second-largest party, to form a new government. ¹

Erbakan's ruling Welfare Party was subsequently banned by the courts, which held that the party had an agenda to promote Islamic fundamentalism in the state, and Erbakan was barred once again from active politics. He had argued that a truly democratic country should not shut down a political party for its beliefs. He was tried and sentenced to two years and four months' imprisonment in the "Lost Trillion Case", involving forged documents used to prevent the return of Treasury grants after the party's ban. ¹

Despite often being under a political ban, Erbakan acted as a mentor and informal adviser to former Welfare Party members who founded the Virtue Party in 1997, among them the future Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Virtue Party was itself banned in 2001; by then Erbakan's ban had ended, and he founded the Felicity Party, which he led in 2003–2004 and again from 2010 until his death. ¹

This section should be read as a presentation of differing positions reported in the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

His supporters: His movement's supporters saw in Millî Görüş a path for Turkey to develop by its religious values and by closer relations with the Muslim world. According to The Economist, at his death Erbakan was acknowledged as a moderating force on Turkey's Islamists, and made Turkey a possible model for the Arab world. ¹

His critics: Turkey's secular authorities and Constitutional Court treated his activity as a violation of the constitutional separation of religion and state, dissolving his parties one after another and banning him from politics. His foreign policy on the African tour was criticised, and his image was damaged by a speech making fun of the nightly demonstrations against the Susurluk scandal, for which he was widely blamed for indifference at the time. ¹

As the article sets out his views, his foreign policy had two main pillars: Pan-Islamism and struggle against Zionism. He created the "Developing Eight" (D-8) to achieve economic and political unity among Muslim countries; its eight members are Turkey, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria. ¹

In 1969 Erbakan published the manifesto entitled Millî Görüş (National View), which sets forth his political ideology. ¹

Erbakan died on 27 February 2011 at 11:40 local time of heart failure at Güven Hospital in Çankaya, Ankara. His body was transferred to Istanbul, and following the funeral service at the Fatih Mosque the crowd accompanied his coffin some 4 km to the Merkezefendi Cemetery, where he was laid to rest beside his wife Nermin. He did not wish for a state funeral, however his funeral was attended by the highest state and government officials. ^{1 3}

His son Fatih Erbakan is also a political party leader who follows Millî Görüş, at the head of the New Welfare Party. ¹

Erbakan led Turkey's Islamic political movement for four decades. The parties he founded or inspired repeatedly reshaped Turkish party politics despite their repeated bans, and a generation of politicians who later reached the state's highest offices emerged from his movement's ranks. ¹

• The defined sources cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article require periodic review with clear update dates.