Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan said secularism was a part of the founding principles of the Turkish Republic, complementing the democratic, social and constitutional dimensions of its existence. Erdoğan said Turkey could reach its aims only through adhering to these principles. Though the prime minister’s message on secularism supported the principles of the Turkish regime, between the lines of his speech Erdoğan sent messages to the military and extra-political centers of power who regard themselves as the “guardian of the secular state.”
“The Turkish people have internalized secularism. The nation is the sole guardian of this principle,” said the prime minister. He reiterated that today Turkey saw and understood the importance of secularism as a guarantee of freedom for different beliefs and lifestyles. Erdoğan called on people to utilize secularism not as a separatist force but as a unifying one and asked politicians to keep secularism out of day-to-day discussions of politics.
However, Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer warned that though secularism was the guarantee of all freedoms, including freedom of belief, it was more than that. President Sezer defined secularism as is recorded in the Turkish Constitution and said that looking for other descriptions was incompatible. There have been discussions in Turkey about the real definition of secularism.
Sezer described secularism as the axis of the Turkish revolution and said that Atatürk, the founder of the republic, believed that reaching the level of modern countries was only possible by cleansing the legal and social structure of the state from religious rules. Sezer claimed that secularism was the symbol of Turkey’s evolution from an ummah to a nation, from servitude of God to citizenship and from backwardness to modernity. There was strong similarity between Sezer’s message and Cumhuriyet daily’s leading column on Monday, which claimed a dialectic dichotomy between being a “servant of God” and being a citizen.
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