Gül
AKP Watch August 24th, 2007
“This is the end of the republican period,” Mr Gül says flatly. “If 60 per cent of Ankara’s population is living in shacks, then the secular system has failed and we definitely want to change it.”These are the words of the next to-be president, Abdullah Gül, of Turkey during an interview with The Guardian journalist Jonathan Rugman, and it was published on November 27, 1995.
Abdullah Gül has been charged, along with former PM Necmettin Erbakan, in what is known as the “lost trillion” case, whereby they were accused of misuse of trillion lira in state funds and fraud committed during the rule of the Islamist Welfare Party (RP). While Erbakan was convicted of the crime and sentenced to prison term, Abdullah Gul – then State Minister of Erbakan’s government an MP of the outlawed Islamist party –remained a member of parliament and enjoyed parliamentary immunity.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul and his wife Hayrunnisa married in 1980, when he was 30 and she was just only 14, 16 years older than Gül himself.
It was an arranged married as Gül’s mother had spotted the girl at a wedding in Kayseri and chosen her for her son, and the two were married soon after. At the time, Hayrunnisa was in high school and did not cover her head. She left school and began to cover herself in the Islamic fashion.
Many Turks today ask whether Mrs. Gul could have exercised her own free will to cover herself at that young an age, and what kind of role model she would be as First Lady for so many young Turkish girls who are still forced into early marriages and are subject to similarly imposed lifestyles.
