Muslim creationism makes inroads in Turkey

Darwin the terrorist?
Since then, a home-grown strain of anti-Darwinist books has developed with a clearly political message.

“Atlas of Creation” offers more than 500 pages of splendid images comparing fossils with present-day animals to argue that Allah created all life as it is and evolution never took place. Then comes a book-length essay arguing that Darwinism, by stressing the “survival of the fittest,” has inspired racism, Nazism, communism and terrorism.

“The root of the terrorism that plagues our planet is not any of the divine religions, but atheism, and the expression of atheism in our times (is) Darwinism and materialism,” it says.

One Istanbul school unexpectedly received three copies recently. “It’s very well done, with magnificent photos — a very stylish tool of creationist propaganda,” said the headmaster, who asked not to be named.

The driving force behind these books is a reclusive Islamic teacher named Adnan Oktar who over the past decade has published a flood of books under the pseudonym Harun Yahya.

“Harun Yahya has managed to create a media-based and popular form of creationism,” said Taner Edis, a Turkish-born physicist at Truman State University in Missouri.

Harun Yahya, which is probably a pool of writers, has turned out more than 200 books in Turkish and translated many of them into 51 other languages.

Oktar, 50, appears on the group’s Web site sporting a clipped beard and dapper suits. His works can be found in Islamic bookshops around the world and downloaded for free over the Internet.

Nobody seems to know how all this is funded. The Harun Yahya organization, based in Istanbul, declined to comment despite interview requests from Reuters.

Intelligent design making the leap
Intelligent design, a more recent argument about life’s origins that is championed by U.S. Christian groups, may also be making the leap across the Atlantic.

The concept's proponents say some organisms are too complex to have evolved without some superior cause, but avoid calling that cause God, for fear that such a reference would ban the concept from U.S. science textbooks. Last year, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that even the intelligent-design formulation represented a strain of religious thought that should not be advocated in public schools.

Akyol, a Muslim believer who says Darwinism is incompatible with his faith, has been waging an uphill struggle to popularize intelligent design here. But most Turks show no interest because they see no need to avoid naming God.

His lonely campaign got an unexpected boost last month when Education Minister Huseyin Celik hinted on television that he might want to see it added to Turkish textbooks.

“If it’s wrong to say Darwin’s theory should not be in the books because it is in line with atheist propaganda, we can’t disregard intelligent design because it coincides with beliefs of monotheistic religions about creation,” he told CNN Turk.

This article includes additional reporting by Daren Butler for Reuters.

MORE FROM SCIENCE

Science Section Front

Cosmic Log: The bird vs. the Big Bang Machine Good news! NASA says world won’t end in 2012 Top 10 doomsday predictions that failed Friday the 13th: Your luck is about to change Humans still evolving as our brains shrink India to move all zoo elephants to wildlife parks Super-sniffing bees combat colony pest Power cut during heat wave shuts Australian zoo Record high temps are double the lows Chimps don't talk: Now experts may know why Science Section Front   Add Science headlines to your news reader: