Leadership Quote by Ahmet Necdet Sezner

"Freedom of belief and worship" is framed here less as a lofty ideal than as a practical piece of civic infrastructure: the thing that keeps the whole building from shaking itself apart. Coming from Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a jurist-turned-president in a country where secularism is not just a constitutional principle but a cultural battlefield, the line reads like a warning delivered in the language of reassurance. He doesn’t sell religious liberty as moral generosity; he sells it as risk management.

The phrasing is doing careful political work. "Belief" and "worship" covers both the private interior (what you think) and the public exterior (what you do), a pairing that matters in Turkey’s long-running disputes over visibility: headscarves, religious education, public prayer, minority congregations. By making these freedoms the "most important guarantee", Sezer implicitly argues that stability is not produced by suppressing religion in the name of order, nor by letting majoritarian piety dominate public life. Social peace, in this view, is a bargain: the state protects space for faith, and faith communities accept the state’s neutral rules.

The subtext is also about legitimacy. A state that polices worship too aggressively invites grievance, underground politics, and martyr narratives; a state that plays favorites turns citizenship into a hierarchy. Sezer’s line is calibrated for a society anxious about polarization: protect pluralism not because it’s fashionable, but because the alternative is permanent political combustion.