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The Moslem Brüderbund accused him of interfering in Egypt's internal affairs, even though he did not interfere in anything; he merely explained the relationship between religion and state in an attempt to give Egypt's intelligentsia a way out of the crisis that could very well kill the dreams of democracy and freedom and ruin the economy.
This crisis is in fact responsible for the economic losses in the stock market, tourism, and foreign investment, because it maintains a state of uncertainty and tension.
As the two parties kept fighting, Tahrir Square continued to be the scene of successive protests and sit-ins, and in response the state almost stopped planning for the future and working on ending the transitional phase in a rapid manner.
Erdogan shared his party's experience with an extreme secularism that prohibited calls for prayers and violently repressed any aspects of Mohammedan religiosity.
It was an experience, he said, that after a lot of hard work culminated in a definition of secularism that grants society its religious rights and dictates that people from all religions or with no religion be treated equally.
I find nothing in Erdogan's definition that contradicts Islam or renders the prime minister an apostate. He is a very religious man who doesn't miss any of his prayers, and when I met him in the 1990s, when he was mayor of Istanbul, I saw a small prayer rug in his office.
It was the late Islamic scholar Salih Ozcan who took me to meet a man in whom he saw a bright future and a powerful comeback of Islam in Turkey.
At the time, Erdogan belonged to the Welfare Party under the leadership of his mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, but he ran Istanbul with a different vision that dealt with reality with a tolerance that made no discrimination between hookers and veiled women.
He never said that the first will burn in hell and therefore have to be eliminated, nor did he say that the second are the only believers. Instead, he offered honest jobs for hookers, like the cleaning of streets, and they gradually left their original occupations and responded to his initiative. This way, Istanbul got rid of the white slavery that had tarnished its civilization.
He didn't need to impose harsh punishments on behavior seen as un-Islamic, nor did he form a morality police force that clamped down on vice. He did not waste his time hunting down alcohol shops and covering the unveiled, nor did he emulate Erbakan in provoking the secularists and instilling fear in them.
He had learned well from all the mistakes made by Islamists throughout Turkey's secular history.
In a few words, he offered us what he learned and what enabled him to do away with the contradiction between his Islamic-oriented party, an offshoot of the Welfare Party that was banned in 1998, and the secular and nationalist parties in the country.
Unfortunately, Islamists did not accept the words and lessons Erdogan offered, but instead hurried to attack the man whom they earlier received in Cairo as the new Mohammedan Caliph.
Had they examined the situation, they would have found out that he wanted to save democracy and see freedom and rotation of power become the main trait of the Arab Spring. He offered a solution to the current squabbles -- before they end up in a situation much more dangerous than tyranny and dictatorship.
Isn't what Erdogan said a modern interpretation of the Koranic rule that forms a constitution stating the relationship between state and religion: "You have your religion; I have mine."
He explained the concept of a civil -- let's not say "secular," since it is an ill-reputed word in Egypt and the Arab world -- state that offers both Islamists and liberals the perfect rescue plan. Will they ever make use of it?
(Farrag Ismail is managing editor of AlArabiya.net.)