His family was originally from Rize,[1] a conservative town on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and returned there when Erdoğan was still an infant, coming back to Istanbul again when he was 13.
[2] He spent those years attending Istanbul İmam Hatip school, and selling watermelons, lemonade, and simit (sesame rings) on the city's streets to make extra bills.
In 1994, Erdoğan was elected Mayor of Istanbul to the shock of the city's more secular citizens, who thought he would ban alcohol and impose Islamic law.
[8] Erdoğan was caught up in this crackdown in 1997, when he made a public speech in the southeastern province of Siirt denouncing the closure of his party and recited these lines of a poem from the Turkish War of Liberation: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers."
A court held that this speech was an attack on the government and Islamist rhetoric, and sentenced Erdoğan in September 1998 to a 10-month prison term, of which he served four months.
Erdoğan had personal reasons to make that choice: He could thus send his veiled daughters, Esra and Sümeyye, not to Turkish universities, where there is a headscarf ban, but to American ones, where the coverings can be worn.
[10] Erdoğan and his colleagues thus put European Union membership, and EU-promoted political reforms, at the top of their agenda – at the expense of being accused of "treason" by their old comrades who stayed loyal to Erbakan.