August 29, 2007, Sydney Morning Herald
Ousted from government by Turkey's Army 10 years ago, Abdullah Gul's political rehabilitation was completed yesterday when the former Islamist was elected as the country's president.
Mr Gul, the Foreign Minister, won the third round of voting in parliament, four months after the Islamist-rooted AKP's first attempt to have him made head of state was stymied by the powerful secular elite, including the army.
Mr Gul's candidacy was always controversial because of his Islamist past and the fact that his wife wears the Muslim-style headscarf, which staunch secularists consider a political act of defiance in the officially secular country. The headscarf is banned from public offices and universities, although more than half of Turkish women wear some form of the garment ...
"The rose season [starts]," said the Islamist-leaning daily Yeni Safak, referring to Mr Gul's name, which means rose in Turkish ...
Mr Gul served briefly as premier when the Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, first swept to power in November 2002, while his close ally, the Prime Minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, was still banned from national politics ...
Mr Gul entered parliament in 1991 with the Islamist Welfare Party. He later become a minister in the government of Necmettin Erbakan, who advocated a new Islam-based economic policy and opposed the EU and NATO ...
