Necmettin Erbakan

Who was Necmettin Erbakan?

Necmettin Erbakan was a Turkish politician, engineer, and academic who was the 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 violating the separation of religion and state as mandated by the constitution, a ban that was later upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.

The Islamist political ideology and movement founded by Erbakan, Millî Görüş, calls for the strengthening of Islamic values in Turkey and turning away from what Erbakan perceived to be the negative influence of the Western world in favor of closer relations to Muslim countries. Erbakan's Islamism led to conflict with the core principle of secularism in Turkey, culminating in his removal from office. With the Millî Görüş ideology, Erbakan was the founder and leader of several prominent Islamist political parties in Turkey from the 1960s to the 2010s, namely the National Order Party, the National Salvation Party, the Welfare Party, the Virtue Party, and the Felicity Party.