Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the 25th prime minister and 12th president of Turkey, was born on February 26, 1954, in Istanbul, Turkey. Childhood years and youth Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was born in Kasımpaşa, a poor neighborhood of Istanbul. His family was originally from Rize, 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. 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. While studying business administration at what is today Marmara University's Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences and playing semi-professional football, Erdoğan also engaged in politics by joining the National Turkish Student Union, an anti-communist action group. In 1976, he became the head of a local youth branch of the Islamist National Salvation Party (MSP), led by Necmettin Erbakan, who would later go on to found the Felicity Party. This was the beginning of Erdoğan's long career in politics. Mayor of Istanbul After the 1980 coup, Erbakan's movement regrouped under the Welfare Party (RP), and Erdoğan gradually became one of its stars. In 1991, Erdoğan became a candidate for Parliament on the party's ticket and won a seat, only to be kept from taking it on a technicality. 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. Instead, he emerged over the next four years as a pragmatic mayor who tackled many chronic problems in the city, including pollution, water shortages and traffic. Meanwhile, the political environment was growing tense in Turkey, as the Welfare Party came to power in June 1996 in a coalition government with the center-right True Path Party (DYP). RP head Necmettin Erbakan, who was an openly Islamist prime minister of Turkey, conflicted with the principle of the separation of religion and state in Turkey with his radical rhetoric. Six months later, in February 1997, the military initiated what was later dubbed the "post-modern coup". Soon, Erbakan was ousted from power and many Islamist groups were the subject of a crackdown as part of a series of court cases opened by prosecutors. Erdoğan was caught up in this crackdown in 1997, when he made a public speech in the southeastern province of