(the first version was posted at 13:28)
Hundreds of thousands of people Tuesday attended the funeral in Istanbul of Necmettin Erbakan, a former prime minister considered the father of Islamist politics in modern Turkey, dpa reported.
Erbakan died at the age of 84 on Sunday from cardiac failure in the capital Ankara.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cancelled an official visit to Brussels in order to be present at his funeral, which was also attended by President Abdullah Gul and Muslim political leaders from a number of countries, including Tunisia, Egypt and Pakistan.
Mourners began to congregate around Istanbul's fifteenth-century Fatih Mosque several hours before the funeral to pay their final respects to their "hodja," or "teacher," as he was respectfully known.
After the ceremony, people watched and escorted the funeral procession as it carried Erbakan to the city's Merkez Efendi cemetery, where he was buried next to his wife.
Though precise numbers were difficult to obtain, the crowd was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, falling short of earlier speculations that up to a million people might turn out to honour Erbakan.
Funeral prayers were also held in the morning at the Haci Bayram mosque in Ankara and attended by government ministers and other Turkish dignitaries, after which Erbakan's body was flown to Istanbul.
The former engineer, who headed four successive Islamist-leaning political parties during the course of his long political career, had specifically requested not to be given a state funeral.
Erbakan's political movement is seen as having paved the way for the mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) to come to power in 2002.
The Turkish politician "did more than any other to redraw the mental map which Turkey has of its place in the world," Andrew Finkel, a long-time Turkey correspondent, wrote in Today's Zaman newspaper Tuesday.
Erbakan became prime minister in 1996 as the leader of the Welfare Party (RP) but was forced by the military to step down a year later due to what it called his government's "anti-secular activities."
The Welfare Party was shut down by the Constitutional Court in 1998 and Erbakan was banned from taking part in politics for the next five years.
Erbakan's political orientation remained staunchly Islamist until the end, and he lost supporters to the more moderate AKP.
The Felicity Party, which he founded and led from 2003 to 2004 and again from 2010 until his death, received just 2.3 percent of the vote in the 2007 general election.
Notwithstanding the low level of electoral support for Erbakan towards the end of his life, his political movement made a lasting impact on Turkish politics and society.
A group of officers from Turkey's staunchly secular military - including the commander of the First Army - were among those who paid their respects at his funeral.