Meet Harun YahyaThe leading creationist in the Muslim world.
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009, at 12:03 PM ET
I was startled by how quickly the phone call came. I'd just sent an e-mail to Istanbul to see whether Islam's leading creationist would be available for an interview. I would soon fly to Turkey for a 10-day fact-finding trip with the International Reporting Project, and I had one free day. Would Harun Yahya, the scourge of Richard Dawkins and founder of a global media empire, be free to talk?
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StumbleUponActually, I wasn't sure it was worth the trouble. Hiring a guide for a day in Istanbul would run me $300, plus more for a translator. But when Harun Yahya's assistant called me from Istanbul—it couldn't have been more than three minutes after my query—she offered to send a driver to pick me up at my hotel on the other side of the city. And the translator? No problem—they'd supply one.
Later, I came to realize this was all part of Harun Yahya's new "charm offensive," as one Istanbul journalist described it to me. Harun Yahya, the pen name for Adnan Oktar, gets some seriously bad press in the West. Newspapers across Europe and the United States have covered his ongoing legal troubles, including charges of extortion and sexual abuse, and the response from scientists has been scathing. Now Yahya is trying to position himself as the go-to critic of evolution … or at least a thorn in the side of modern science.
It may be tempting to dismiss Yahya as a crackpot, but he runs a sophisticated media operation, with perhaps several hundred members, that distributes books, articles, videos, and Web sites around the Muslim world. Two years ago he mailed, unsolicited, a visually stunning 13-pound, 800-page Atlas of Creation to at least 10,000 scientists, doctors, museums, and research centers in Europe and the United States. The cost of this publicity stunt, if that's what it was, had to be staggering.
The great mystery is where Yahya's Science Research Foundation gets its money. No one knows, though speculation runs from Saudi donors to wealthy Turks whose children have joined the secretive group. Whoever funds it, the organization seems to have the kind of wealth and influence that Christian creationists can only dream of. Yahya's teachings aren't confined to a religious subculture in Turkey. They're part of the mainstream.
Creationist stories are now popping up in Turkish high-school science textbooks, and some government officials in the AKP, the ruling Islamic party, freely criticize evolution. In Ankara, the government's point man on religious issues, Mehmet Gormez, told me, "All the holy texts say human beings are created by God. I think evolutionary theory is not scientific, but ideological."
The Quran doesn't have a detailed origins story like the six days of creation found in Genesis, but it does say Adam was created out of clay in a heavenly paradise and later banished to earth, along with Eve. Various polls show that many Muslim countries are predominantly creationist, but Turkey has recently emerged as a hub of global opposition to evolution. In 2006 Science magazine found that only 25 percent of Turks accepted the theory of natural selection—the lowest rate among any of the 34 countries surveyed. (The second-lowest was in the United States.)
Why Islamic creationism has exploded in Turkey is a complicated story that may have as much to do with politics as religion. Unlike most Muslim countries, which simply ignore the science of life's origins, Turkey's high schools have taught evolution for decades—the legacy of Ataturk's campaign to secularize Turkey's public culture. Creationism has become a way for political Islamists to attack the secular elite that governed Turkey until the recent rise of the AKP. Oktar's own agenda isn't confined to evolution. He's calling for a "Turkish-Islamic Union," a Turkish super-state that would stretch from Kazakhstan to Indonesia and western Africa—a revamped Ottoman Empire for today's Muslims.
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Mehmet Gormez has it backward - it's the objection to evolutionary theory that is ideological, not the theory itself.
Although the objection takes different forms among various religions and philosophies, at its core is the belief in human specialness. Opponents at least as far back as Benjamin Disraeli have misinterpreted evolution as a value position, claiming that it proclaims humans to be no better than animals. What opponents don't understand, or choose not to understand, is that value is a human creation and not a natural entity. Humans choose to deem the species as better than animals. Science doesn't (or shouldn't) assign human value to anything in the universe. Even the word "normal" in a scientific context merely connotes prevalence, unlike the cultural context which treats deviation from normal as wrong or bad.
Accordingly, the evolutionary theory is value-neutral for all species, human and otherwise. Even many people who accept evolution do not understand this, mistakenly believing that the survival or extinction of a species amounts to a judgment of a species. The real problem is that people want to believe that everything happens for a reason or purpose, when in fact there is no evidence for either. The idea that our existence could be due to an undirected process seems terrifying to many. Perhaps that's because again, they misinterpret this as undermining human specialness. Or perhaps the terror comes from the realization that the evolutionary process could have gone in another direction that wouldn't have led to human existence.
Oktar's rant about Masonic scientific conspiracies is reminiscent of the rants by the Pat Robertsons and Bill Donahues about secularist conspiracies against Christianity. I suspect that both have roots in fear of social change. The modern creationist movement in America is mostly a political phenomenon, a reaction to the social changes of the 1960s which included Epperson v. Arkansas as well as Engle v. Vitale. Those two issues, taken together, make convenient scapegoats for Christian Dominionists fearful or resentful of those changes.
I suspect a similar phenomenon is at work with the Muslim movement that Oktar exemplifies. Middle Eastern cultures were once leaders in scientific and intellectual pursuits, but the cultures stagnated toward the end of the Middle Ages. The colonial period and the growth of the Western world's economic and information power seems to have produced massive culture shock for many Muslims. My theory is that because of that shock, Oktar and his followers are mistakenly lumping in Darwinism with their other notions about Western imperialism, seeing it as another foreign idea diluting their culture like McDonald's or hip-hop music.
-- Carstonio
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