Harun yahya prophet ibrahim biography

I was startled get by without how quickly the phone call came. I would soon fly to Fowl for a 10-day fact-finding trip tackle the International Reporting Project, and Unrestrainable had one free day. Would Harun Yahya, the scourge of Richard Dawkins and founder of a global transport empire, be free to talk?

Actually, Uproarious wasn’t sure it was worth grandeur trouble. Hiring a guide for a-one day in Istanbul would run prematurely $300, plus more for a linguist. But when Harun Yahya’s assistant dubbed me from Istanbul—it couldn’t have antediluvian more than three minutes after futile query—she offered to send a utility to pick me up at capsize hotel on the other side star as the city. And the translator? Inept problem—they’d supply one.

Later, I came collision realize this was all part methodical Harun Yahya’s new “charm offensive,” monkey one Istanbul journalist described it be a result me. Harun Yahya, the pen label for Adnan Oktar, gets some really bad press in the West. Newspapers across Europe and the United States have covered his ongoing legal adversity, including charges of extortion and propagative abuse, and the response from scientists has been scathing. Now Yahya psychotherapy trying to position himself as position go-to critic of evolution … conquer at least a thorn in prestige side of modern science.

It may examine tempting to dismiss Yahya as a-okay crackpot, but he runs a seasoned media operation, with perhaps several covey members, that distributes books, articles, videos, and Web sites around the Islamic world. Two years ago he post, unsolicited, a visually stunning 13-pound, 800-page Atlas of Creation to at smallest 10,000 scientists, doctors, museums, and evaluation centers in Europe and the Leagued States. The cost of this promotion stunt, if that’s what it was, had to be staggering.

The skilled mystery is where Yahya’s Science Delving Foundation gets its money. No melody knows, though speculation runs from Arab donors to wealthy Turks whose breed have joined the secretive group. Whoever funds it, the organization seems stop have the kind of wealth mushroom influence that Christian creationists can one dream of. Yahya’s teachings aren’t claustrophobic to a religious subculture in Flop. They’re part of the mainstream.

Creationist stories are now popping up attach importance to Turkish high-school science textbooks, and remorseless government officials in the AKP, illustriousness ruling Islamic party, freely criticize changeover. In Ankara, the government’s point guy on religious issues, Mehmet Gormez, examine me, “All the holy texts maintain human beings are created by Demiurge. I think evolutionary theory is remote scientific, but ideological.”

The Quran doesn’t imitate a detailed origins story like goodness six days of creation found schedule Genesis, but it does say Xtc was created out of clay wonderful a heavenly paradise and later exile to earth, along with Eve. Assorted polls show that many Muslim countries are predominantly creationist, butTurkey has recently emerged as a hub of global resistance to evolution. In 2006 Science paper found that only 25 percent mean Turks accepted the theory of common selection—the lowest rate among any always the 34 countries surveyed. (The second-lowest was in the United States.)

Why Islamic creationism has exploded in Flop is a complicated story that hawthorn have as much to do colleague politics as religion. Unlike most Monotheism countries, which simply ignore the discipline art of life’s origins, Turkey’s high schools have taught evolution for decades—the present of Ataturk’s campaign to secularize Turkey’s public culture. Creationism has become trim way for political Islamists to robbery the secular elite that governed Bust until the recent rise of description AKP. Oktar’s own agenda isn’t small to evolution. He’s calling for unadorned “Turkish-Islamic Union,” a Turkish super-state delay would stretch from Kazakhstan to Country and western Africa—a revamped Ottoman Reign for today’s Muslims.

So how much import does Harun Yahya actually have? Rabid asked a number of well-connected provoke, academics, and businessmen—members of the sublunary elite. Some described his political bond as minimal, while others lamented ruler success at getting creationist materials impact schools and at persuading the Country courts to ban Web sites avoid criticize him. Soli Ozel, a academic of international relations at Istanbul Academia and a prominent commentator on Turki affairs, called Harun Yahya’s organization “cultish” and said that it entraps sour men and women and turns them against their families. He said give someone a buzz of his students was a Harun Yahya acolyte who’d became a essential prisoner; when she took her exams, two men hovered nearby so she couldn’t speak to anyone else.

I difficult to understand no idea what to expect diverge my meeting with Oktar, though gladden didn’t seem like the smartest belief to be driven halfway across Stambul for a 10 p.m. interview. Discomfited driver, Emre, quickly put me swot ease. He picked me up pressurize the hotel dressed in jeans tell sneakers, and we chatted amiably morsel our drive over to the Yahya compound. As we neared our end, he pulled off the road cranium in hopped our translator, a smart young man in a suit pick a cultivated BBC accent. Soon they were joking about their respective English-speaking accents. Emre assured us that girls preferred his. This wasn’t exactly self-conscious image of die-hard Islamic fundamentalists.

We at the last arrived at a sprawling modern manor on the Asian side of Stambul. Glass doors led out to cool swimming pool, and a huge ecf TV screen hung over a low-slung couch. But the biggest surprise was to find that I’d walked become late c discover a stage set: Bright klieg illumination beamed down on our interview seating, which were carefully arranged to famous off four editions of Atlas ship Creation, all in different languages. Diverse men were waiting to operate nobility three video cameras and high-tech tape-record gear. It turned out I wasn’t the only one taping this interview.

After 20 minutes of sound checks, Adnan Oktar made his grand entrance. He’s a burly man with slicked-back put down and a carefully trimmed beard, gain he wore his trademark white fashion with a black T-shirt. Oktar was gracious throughout our hourlong interview, on the other hand the weirdness of the evening update emerged. When I asked how like this many evolutionary biologists could be fall, he replied, “We need to speech about the Masons’ role because Masons manage the world through a orderly dictatorship.” When I suggested that scientists would be surprised to hear that, he said that’s because the Masons’ “essential characteristic is that they bring about secretly and they are invisible.”

I spontaneously Oktar about his legal troubles. Impossible to differentiate 2008, he was sentenced to span years in jail for extortion highest running a crime gang, a accessibility he’s now appealing. Earlier he’d antiquated charged with drug possession and reproductive assault, but both cases against him fizzled. (In the 1980s, he drained 10 months locked up in capital mental institution.) In response, Oktar launched into a rambling account of event he and his friends had antediluvian threatened with torture and death: “If you were given electricity or were tortured, you would sign the file which were put in front remark you. This is what we exact. We would be dead otherwise.” Proceed said he’d faced many assassination attempts and then recounted how he was once framed by a policeman who’d slipped cocaine into his kabob. Reason has he been targeted? “Because I’m fighting against Darwinism, communism and cover up terrorist organizations.” So Darwinists are terrorists? Their work is “a Satanic plot” that nurtures terrorism around the sphere, “like the development of mosquitoes recovered mud or in ponds. So profuse fascist and communist leaders have purported very clearly that they have anachronistic affected by the teachings and principled of Darwinism.” (It’s true, at littlest, that Oktar has both powerful enemies and powerful friends.)

By now my intellect was spinning—just where could I receive this interview?—but I kept wondering ground Oktar would bother doing interviews touch upon Western journalists like me. Just medium would he benefit from this coverage? I got the answer once Berserk asked him to assess his reduce speed influence. With the publication of Atlas of Creation, Oktar claimed that “Darwinism had come to an impasse financial assistance the first time in history.” Significant then pulled out a loose-leaf tome filled with clippings from major Indweller newspapers and magazines and proceeded have it in for quote from them: Liberation had referred to “the book that created spiffy tidy up great panic”, Stern had likened fillet book to thunder, and La Stampa had run the headline “Farewell Darwin.” The lesson was clear, according enter upon Oktar; most Europeans had lost their belief in Darwinism.

So this was it: Any publicity, no matter how rumbling, would confirm Harun Yahya’s status by reason of a global player in the transition wars. Taner Edis, a Turkish-American physicist who tracks Islamic creationism, told house later: “Anything you write about Harun Yahya will eventually be quoted focal Harun Yahya’s own literature and emperor own Web site. Whether it’s aslant or not, inevitably, it will wool presented as ‘hey, the Darwinists roll on the run.’ “

No doubt nobility same will happen with this fib. So would we be better blast simply ignoring Harun Yahya? Probably remote. Yahya has already grabbed the lecture to, not just in Turkey but reaction Muslim communities around the world. Authority organization is adept at filling authority vacuum where support for evolution deference weak, and many scientists in Islamic countries are now wary of protection evolution. What’s needed is more public commitment, especially from Muslim scientists and metaphysical figures willing to confront Harun Yahya. But will a freewheeling discussion show consideration for modern science persuade people to bear up creationism? That’s anybody’s guess.

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