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. He was also banned from holding political office for life. "Erdoğan's political career is over," some mainstream newspapers wrote at the time. "From now on, he can't even be a local governor." Between 1999 and 2001 In the aftermath of the post-modern coup, Erdoğan came to believe that a new political line, different from Erbakan's anti-Western demagoguery, was needed. This was something he hinted at in the Siirt speech that netted him a prison term. As part of that speech, Erdoğan also said: "The Western man has freedom of belief; in Europe, there is respect for worship, for the headscarf. Why is there not in Turkey?" This Western-oriented line would be the new vision of Erdoğan and the more open-minded members of the Erbakan movement, such as Abdullah Gül. In their vision, authoritarian secularism in Turkey should not be considered an extension of the West, as religious conservatives had done for decades. The West should rather be seen as a way to create a more liberal Turkey that would respect religious liberty as well. 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. 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. The birth of the AKP In 2001, Erdoğan and Gül established the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The party chose as its emblem a modern light bulb, and Erdoğan asserted that the AKP was "not a political party with a religious axis", but rather one that could be defined as a mainstream conservative party. Its message concentrated on political liberalization and economic growth gave the party a sweeping victory in the general elections of November 2002. Even though his party won