Can you tell me about the leader of this big creationist movement in Turkey, the man who goes by the name Harun Yahya?
Harun Yahya is a pseudonym. It's supposed to be a pseudonym for a Turkish religious leader whose name is Adnan Oktar. However, the amount of material that's put out under the name of Harun Yahya is absolutely immense. There are hundreds of books, articles, DVDs, tapes, magazines, all under the name Harun Yahya. So this is clearly not the production of one single person. Indeed, Adnan Oktar doesn't have the kind of educational background even to successfully fake a pseudoscience. The operation is distributing material in Europe and the United States. They mainly target a Muslim audience, but it's a modern Muslim audience. So they tend to target countries such as Turkey.
Did this movement come over from America? Was Harun Yahya inspired by American creationists who proselytized in Turkey?
No. There is some American influence, but it's fairly minimal. The Turkish creationists have taken the initiative and gotten in touch with organizations like the Institute for Creation Research in California. And what they've taken from American creationists are basically ideas and strategies for how to get creationism into textbooks. So Islamic creationism is an indigenous movement which is inspired by some aspects of Western creationism.
Is the critique of Darwinism basically the same as what you'd find from American creationists?
Much of the rhetoric is similar. There are only so many ways you can argue against evolution, only so many ways you can say the fossil record doesn't tell you what the biologists say. But there are also differences. For example, in American creationist circles, one of the stronger options is "Young Earth creationism." People who read the Book of Genesis literally believe in a creation that happened 10,000 years ago, literally done in six days. But the Quran is much vaguer about the time frame of divine action. Therefore, they are not as committed to fitting earth history into thousands of years. So Muslim creationists are almost invariably "Old Earth creationists." They tend to think of Noah's flood as a local event -- not such a big thing -- unlike the American creationists who think of the flood as the major geological event in earth history. So there are lots of differences that adapt creationism to the Islamic context.
What about the idea that human beings have a common ancestor with chimpanzees?
That's definitely a no-no. And this goes beyond creationism. It goes beyond Harun Yahya. By and large, because the Quran is fairly explicit about the special creation of humans -- Adam and Eve and so forth -- you will find that Muslims will typically be very reluctant to allow for human evolution.
I'm curious about your own background. Was Islam ever an important part of your life?
No. The Turkish side of my family is very secular. Some of my Turkish relatives are somewhat observant, but even they are very liberal-minded about their Islam. So I grew up in a very nonreligious household.
Do you consider yourself a Muslim?
No, I'm not. I'm not a religious person.
Why have you chosen to live in the United States rather than in Turkey?
Being part American and part Turkish, I have to choose one. I'm equally at home in both countries. But if you're going to have a career teaching physics, and an intellectual life in general, the United States is an easier place to do this. It has more resources, and it's just more comfortable to do science in the United States.
What makes it hard to be a physicist in Turkey?
First of all, factors that have nothing to do with religion. Turkey is a poor country. The amount of resources that they can devote to basic scientific investigations is very low. The physics department in Turkey where I got my undergraduate degree had some very good teachers, but the resources we had were fairly poor compared to any American university. I got my Ph.D. in the United States, and I've been here ever since. It really is much easier to stay in the United States.
There are some Muslims who talk about the need for an "Islamic science" that's quite distinct from Western science. They say we shouldn't separate knowledge of the physical world from knowledge of the spiritual world because they are interconnected. And they often argue that science should have an ethical dimension. We shouldn't just do science for the sake of knowledge. We should always be concerned about the moral outcomes. Does it make sense to talk about an Islamic science?
There are efforts to formulate a more Islamic science. The people who have this ethical context in mind are thinking not so much about physics or biology, but social science and applied science. Why are we doing this? And how can we include ethical and social concerns in our studies of the world? Debates about this take place among Western scientists as well. It's perfectly legitimate. What gets more interesting -- and from a mainstream scientific view, more dubious -- is the notion that you can take an Islamic point of view and allow these faith-based, revealed ideas to constrain how you investigate the world.
I'm assuming most scientists would say science is science. If it's done well, it doesn't matter who does it.
And many devout Muslim thinkers would agree with that.
The London-based writer and critic Ziauddin Sardar has argued that "Western science is inherently destructive and does not, cannot, fulfill the needs of Muslim societies." He says Western science has become an ideology that's highly efficient but is also dehumanizing.
Such sentiments are not difficult to come by in the Islamic world. A lot of these issues are matters of debate among Muslim intellectuals and people who are devout. There's no single point of view. I can also quote conservative Muslim intellectuals who say, "No, science is science except for a few exceptions here and there." But this idea of Islamizing science -- to give a specifically Islamic flavor to science -- has been very attractive to a good number of intellectuals in the Islamic world. I have a hard time seeing that as a positive development.
What would it mean to Islamize science?
The hope for Islamizing science is to defuse the threat that modern science poses toward more overtly religious ways of perceiving the world. In all areas of natural science, we seem to be converging on a purely naturalistic description of how the world works. And so concepts like supernatural agents or revelations start looking out of place to the way modern science has come to describe the world. And that's an issue for devout Muslims. So they would imagine, perhaps, a Muslim biology that includes concepts of divine design in the very notion of how you do biology in the first place.
There are a lot of people in the United States -- liberal Christians, Jews and Buddhists - who also complain about what they call "scientism" -- the idea that science explains all there is in the world. It obliterates the spiritual life. These people also tend to be fully supportive of evolution, but they say science can only explain so much.
You can find Muslim thinkers making similar pronouncements. "Scientism" and "reductionism" have become stock accusations in religious circles. I don't know if there's much more content here than saying, "I don't like naturalistic ideas."
You have been outspoken in your criticisms of science in the Islamic world and, by implication, the stranglehold that certain ways of Islamic thinking have had on science. Do you get flak for that?
Not really. First of all, these are points of view that many liberal-minded Muslims would agree with. My criticism of the state of science in Islamic lands is not dependent on my judgment about the existence of the supernatural. And Muslims themselves, even very conservative Muslims, are very aware that the Islamic world has a problem in science. As long as a secular person like myself is not doing some sort of Islam-bashing but has something genuine to contribute, even conservative Muslims can be very positive about engaging in this debate. Generally, my relations with Muslim creationists have been very cordial. I think the science they're putting out is complete nonsense. But that doesn't mean we have to be personally hostile.
So is there a way for Muslims to create a scientific culture that would really take root and flourish?
I don't know. My preference would be that the more liberal strains of Islam would gain more power, so that science and technology can be more autonomous from religious and moral concerns. Without this, I don't see the Islamic world taking a trajectory in science that's going to be similar to the Western world's. However, in the end, this is not something for me to decide. I'm an outside critic, being over here.
About the writer
Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally-syndicated program "To the Best of Our Knowledge." He has also been a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science & Religion.
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