The nutty surgeon

No doubt, this man is the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) ideal health minister. Sorry, incumbent minister, Mehmet Müezzinoğlu, but you are facing a dangerous challenge from a small-city surgeon.

Associate Professor İlker Alat is a cardiovascular surgeon at the state hospital in Afyon (250 kilometers southwest of Ankara, population around 250,000). His debut into the realm of halal medicine in Turkey was stormy and full of hints that the future belongs to this man. Not merely because he probably secretly replaced the Hippocratic oath at his graduation ceremony with Hamas’ charter, but also because he has portrayed himself to be just too fit for politics with Turkey’s most powerful political party.

Professor Alat has advised against the use of non-halal medicine, which he claimed could be any medicine, its contents, capsules, medicinal tablets, surgery material or equipment that does not comply with Islam. Yes, even capsules, because, according to Mr. Alat, most capsules contain pork fat. And when producers use cattle fat instead of pork, the professor argues, that does not make a medicine halal because “we do not know how the cattle in question had been slaughtered” (i.e. whether they were slaughtered with Islamic prayers or not).

By the way, what about the 100 percent halal medicine wrapped in 100 percent halal capsules with 100 percent halal packaging but invented by a pharmacologist who occasionally sips a glass of wine and eats bacon sandwiches? Should that be written on the medicine packaging so that the patients are forewarned about “sinning?”

That’s why, Professor Alat confesses, “I never prescribe capsule medicine for my patients.” Lucky patients – although we have no means to know if the professor asks his patients whether they would prefer proper medicines or their halal substitutes (just as we have no means to know what fatality rate his patients record compared to similar-case patients at non-halal hospitals in the backward, miserable, pork-eating, alcohol-drinking West).

The AKP bigwigs should consider nominating Professor Alat for the next Nobel Medicine Prize for his “Theory on Why Devout Muslim Medical Treatment Methods are Superior to Non-Halal Methods: A Comparative Analysis based on My Faith.”

I humbly advise the House of the AKP to also appoint the man as the party’s official cardiovascular surgeon. In the unwanted event (God forbid!) that a Cabinet minister, an MP or their loved ones require cardiovascular surgery and post-operation treatment, this man should be in charge. Would the honorable ministers and MPs not prefer a 100 percent, all-too-pure, Islam-compliant cardiovascular treatment? I bet (well, not literally) they would.

Professor Alat’s warning against non-halal treatment have become quite timely as we journalists restlessly debate why Egypt has failed to look like Turkey; how soon Turkey will look like Egypt; or how soon the Turkish clergy will declare voting for the opposition to be satanic. No doubt, the surgeon made a fine debut but he should make further progress to show us all how science and reason would look like when controlled by the conservative Islamist mind.

For instance, Professor Alat could launch a campaign against his “infidel colleagues” who keep on prescribing fruits to their patients – as fruits contain alcohol whose every drop is forbidden in the Quran. A next move could be a campaign against the use of anesthetic in surgery because this practice drugs a person and the Quran forbids “all kinds of intoxicants (5:90).” Professor Alat can always experiment his anesthetic-free, halal cardiovascular surgery methodology among his AKP patients.

And as a final move, the devout Muslim professor can gradually switch to using Saudi-, Turkish- and Egyptian-made cardiovascular surgery equipment and medical material instead of the Western, non-halal ones. It must be a joint Jewish-Christian conspiracy that Muslim surgeons are still forced to use non-Muslim medical equipment 14 centuries after the birth of their religion. It is time a genius Muslim professor thwarted the conspiracy!