Protesters in front of the Republic Monument, which depicts Atatürk’s founding of the Turkish Republic, in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, adjacent to Gezi Park.
focus on the military’s role in Turkey’s founding, many of the Young Turks who promoted hardcore secularism during that period were originally members of the medical community. This “militant secularism” persists today. Shuaib Raza, Yale College ’14, spent the summer conducting cancer research in hospitals around Istanbul and saw the consequences firsthand.
Raza explains: “People of faith are still restricted in whom they could shadow as medical residents, and it is still really difficult to find a place to pray at or around medical campuses.” It remains taboo if not explicitly prohibited to wear a veil in hospitals, medical schools, and other health areas. Other statements by the TMA demonstrate how deep this anti-AKP bias
runs. In a June 29th press release, the TMA denounced Prime Minister Erdoğan’s “projects to create ‘religiously devout generations’ fit to his thinking, his ‘ideas’ that intervene in women’s private life from abortion to fertility, his authoritarian style of governing and plans for dictatorship.”7 Far from an objective discussion of legitimate health violations, the document is a polemic
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