The Invisible Library

In a nice change of pace, I recieved this piece of spam from a website of a Muslim Creationist from Turkey, declaring simply:

Primitive Man never existed, and there never was a Stone age

And providing a link to the website of Harun Yahya (http://www.harunyahya.com/index.php)*. If you haven’t heard of Harun Yahya, he’s the pen name for Adnan Oktar:

Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Adnan Hoca) was born in Ankara in 1956 and lived there until he moved to Istanbul in 1979. He is one of the leading figures in Turkish creationism, and a fervent advocate of creationism in the creation vs. evolution debate. He is considered the leading Muslim advocate of creationism; unlike the majority of Christian creationists he subscribes to Old Earth creationism. He is an anti-zionist and anti-mason which he sees as very interrelated movements. Although he rejects allegations of anti-Semitism, claiming pagan and Darwinist roots for anti-Semitism [1] he is also credited as a Holocaust denier [2], with his book Soykırım Yalanı (The Holocaust Hoax).

[…] Oktar has written numerous books using the pen name Harun Yahya (Harun (Aron) and Yahya (John)), arguing against Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. He also argues that evolution is directly related to the claimed evils of materialism, nazism and communism. Most of his anti-evolution resources are identical to Christian creationist arguments and the scientific community have made identical critiques. [8]
He also has produced various works on Zionism and Freemasonry, accusing Zionists of racism and arguing that Zionism and Freemasonry have had significant negative effects on world history and politics. Finally, he has written more than a hundred books describing the morals of the Qur’an and faith related issues. Literally hundreds of books are credited to Oktar. Some claim therefore that others must have contributed to, or simply written, many of the books. This charge is adamantly denied on his web site; he claims sole authorship of all of the books.

[…] These books attempt to display for non-Muslims what Oktar claims to be signs of the existence of God, and the excellence of his creation. A sub-group within this series are the series of “Books Demolishing the Lie of Evolution”. The main purpose of these books is to attack the ideas of Materialism, Evolution, Darwinism, and atheism.

He even blindly attacks Buddhism for being a false religion built upon idolatry and falsehood […]

The covers of all of Oktar’s books bear the seal of the Prophet Muhammad. This seal is used on the Qur’an as an indication that the Qur’an is the last book and the last word of God, and the Prophet Muhammad is the last of His messengers. By taking this attribute of the Qur’an and the Prophet, Oktar claims that his books are the “last word” which will put a definite end to the arguments of his adversaries.

He makes all the usual mistakes that the ill-informed and ignorant make about Evolution and atheism: guilt by association (linking Evolution to Nazis, Communists, and whatever else enters his addled little mind), fringe science, The usual Social Conservatism and racism and offering it up in a nice frothy stew of mysticism and nonsense. And here I was hopping he would have something unique to add to the culture war. But unfortunately, he just borrows the same Christian Creationist screeds and substitutes the Christian names for Muslim mythological proper nouns.

Wikipedia links to some of his videos, in case you feel like a good chuckle.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Kooks, Culture War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.