Political Creationism in Turkey
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
Fundamentalist Bedfellows Political Creationism in Turkey By Arthur M. Shapiro The FBI says you should be wary if you receive an unexpected package from abroad—it might be a letter bomb....
...It was a bomb of another kind: a lavishly produced, fullcolor illustrated paperback called The Evolution Deceit: The Scientific Collapse of Darwinism and its Ideological Background...
...Why, then, was it published in English...
...Does ICR care that its Turkish friends are using its materials and assistance to destabilize Turkey...
...All that rang a bell...
...It also publishes and promotes an amazing array of books, pamphlets and videos aimed mainly at homeschoolers and the evangelical Christian market...
...All these activities have been very richly funded, but the sources of the funds remain obscure...
...All of us were reasonably prominent in opposing creationism here at home...
...By the time of the 1980 coup the military, which has traditionally considered itself the protector of Kemalist ideology, had become relatively favorable to what might be called "a tame Islam" as a weapon against Marxism...
...So when I got a mystery mailing sent from Britain via an air-carrier service in early December, I opened it...
...Campaigning on the slogan "A great Turkey once again," a clever appeal to Ottoman nostalgia, the NSP came in third in the general election held within a year of its founding, taking 11.8 per cent of the vote...
...The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a nonprofit American organization that tracks creationist activity and provides help of various kinds to those trying to keep religious concepts out of public school science classes...
...But why Turkey...
...Soon afterward Tatli's effort was amplified into a booklet called Evolution, a Bankrupt Theory, widely distributed by the political Islamists...
...Clearly someone wanted us to know about the situation in Turkey...
...Thirty-three Welfare deputies, seeing this coming, therefore formed the Virtue Party...
...The first explicit Islamist formation after the coup was the Welfare Party, founded in 1983...
...It gets outlawed by the government periodically, and quickly resurfaces using a different name...
...In 1994 the party captured 327 local governments...
...Or is it content to operate at the simplistic level of the ancient Middle Eastern adage that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend...
...During Welfare's ascendance, ICR's Duane Gish and John Morris (son of Henry) appeared at a creationist congress in Istanbul and antiDarwinism became a solid plank in the Islamist platform...
...Predictably, it concluded that evolution had been falsified by scientists and was still being taught only because of its ideological value to Marxists...
...But it seems unlikely that anyone would go to the expense of preparing and publishing an entire English-language version just for that purpose...
...It omits any reference to the age of the earth and Noah's flood, however—two staples of the Christian creationist argument...
...For example, there ispractically always a fundamentalist party in Turkey...
...Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer, is the founder and now "President Emeritus" of the ICR, which has long been the most active source of "young Earth" creationist propaganda and activity in America...
...Most of these are apparently available in both Turkish and English...
...The volume itself is fascinating...
...They are too busy trying to come to power...
...He also phoned the ICR in San Diego and asked it to furnish materials suitable for translation and distribution in Turkey...
...it isn't anymore...
...It also contains a bibliography of Harun Yahya's works...
...Does it have any concern about the potential effect of political creationism in Turkey on the future of NATO or the stability of the eastern Mediterranean...
...Islam has traditionally been relatively 'old Earth creation' in orientation, but this new alliance is not as odd as it might seem, since Islam, Christianity and Judaism share so many common religious ideas...
...Political and cultural tensions were rising steadily in Turkey in the 1970s, and the country seemed headed toward civil war...
...The ICR's Impact leaflet Number 318, published in December 1999, presents its work in Turkey as an effort to bring the Turks to Christ...
...I dimly recalled that its former journal, Creation/Evolution, had published an article on Turkish creationism several years ago...
...But in the meantime, BAV's most prominent opponents had been "profiled" in AKIT, an Islamist newspaper often described as the voice of terrorism...
...Between then and 1935, onepillar of Islamic tradition after another fell —from the purely symbolic wearing of the fez to the inferior status of women...
...Although hardly eminent figures at home, the visitors were publicized as very important American researchers and leaders of international science...
...In the process, the constitutionally privileged status of Islam, the influential Islamic brotherhoods, the religious courts, and Arabic script were swept away...
...Led by the veteran strategist Necmettin Erbakan, Welfare rose steadily at the polls —from7.2 percent of the vote in 1987 to an amazing 21.4 per cent in 1995...
...Those of us who received The Evolution Deceit are wondering why...
...Why sent to us...
...Between August 1998 and May 1999, BAV staged local meetings and rallies in some 60 Turkish cities...
...It includes an inflammatory Introduction by Ubeydullah Kiiçiik that refers to Darwinism as a "demonic hypothesis" inflicted upon society by the "fundamentally flawed Western civilization...
...Perhaps it is not surprising that the ICR would establish a foothold in that Muslim country...
...Some intellectuals equated modernization with Westernization and secularization, while others claimed that Islamic institutions and culture could be selectively hybridized with Western technology...
...But the tide was already turning in favor of the Islamists and, soon, of creationism...
...The next Islamist incarnation, the National Order Party, was outlawed in 1971 and its successor, the National Salvation Party, (NSP) fell—along with the rest of the civilian parties—in the coup of September 12, 1980...
...Under sections 163,241 and 242 of the Turkish Penal Code, the Progressive Republican Party, the Free Republican Party and the Nation Party were all outlawed before 1955...
...As it happens, though, the ICR was invited into Turkey for political purposes in the early 1980s...
...Some of these pioneering young men have gone on to political prominence, like Recep Tayip Erdogan, the former Mayor of Istanbul...
...In May 1999 the Ankara Civil Court ordered BAV to pay monetary damages to some of the victims of this campaign...
...One thing I do know, though: Now that I have learned more about ICR's allies in Turkey, I'm going to be a lot more careful about unexpected packages in the mail...
...It places the issue of creation vs...
...ICR had already helped to establish a clone, the Science Research Foundation, known by its Turkish initials as BAV...
...Ararat, the traditional resting place of Noah's Ark, and explorers with a Christian agenda have been looking for traces of that big boat for many decades...
...But the Turks the ICR is working with have little interest in coming to Christ...
...None of us seemed to have a direct Turkish connection...
...Yet the book is explicitly intended for a Turkish audience...
...evolution solidly in an ideological context, in a way American creationists rarely do up front...
...Within a day I learned that several other American evolutionary biologists had received copies too...
...In 1996 it entered into an unlikely and intrinsically unstable coalition with the secularist True Path Party, and Erbakan, who had once been banned from politics, became Prime Minister...
...Welfare assiduously cultivated its base, providing social services the government could not or would not deliver...
...It is closely modeled on the commonest arguments used by American Christian creationists, but cleverly recast in a Muslim mold with frequent references to Allah and the Koran...
...After Welfare was outlawed, BAV began an intense campaign of creationist agitation, staging three "international conferences" in 1998 with star speakers recruited from ICR and other American sources...
...The treatment is thus a powerful tool of intimidation, and it can still be fatal...
...Tatli's report reproduced the ICR's arguments, but omitted all Christian references and specifically such Christian Fundamentalist hobbyhorses as the age of the Earth...
...The English of The Evolution Deceit is good and fairly idiomatic, but is clearly that of a nornnative speaker...
...Turkey, after all, is the home of Mt...
...Two years later Minister of Education Vehbi Dinçerler, an avowed Islamist, commissioned a "report" on Darwinism from a known fellow antievolutionist, Adem Tatli, for dissemination among Turkish educators as a "working paper...
...In his introduction to the piece, the editor tied Turkish creationism explicitly to the activities of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) in southern California: "The movement in Turkey is a 'literalist' translation of Christian creationism à la Henry Morris and the Institute for Creation Research...
...In the early 1990s several secularist intellectuals were murdered after being profiled in its pages...
...From 1973 to 1978, it participated in three coalition governments and succeeded in equalizing the status of religious and secular high schools...
...The Army perceived Erbakan and Welfare as tilting dangerously close to militant pan-Islamism, particularly since it had begun courting Libya's Muammar Qaddafi and was trying to forge close ties to Iran...
...In recent years ICR has increasingly retreated to workshops at churches and Christian centers and to the conventional lecture circuit...
...Once Kemal Atatürk solidified his power and became President of the new Turkish Republic in 1923, its lot was solidly cast with the secularists...
...It equates Darwinism with materialism with atheism with Marxism, and claims that adherents of any of these "can never possess idealistic notions such as patriotism, love for one's people, justice, loyalty, honesty, sacrifice, honor, or good morals...
...There has never been any extended period since the secular state was established, however, when Islamism has not had some kind of political presence...
...At least that was the usual scenario for years...
...The NCSE has disseminated information about the ICR's tactics widely enough to discourage unskilled evolutionists from debating, and the ICR has learned that it actually can lose to the right opponent...
...Its own materials suggest either complete disingenuousness or incredible naïvet...
...Who would want to letter-bomb me...
...To understand this requires a brief reprise of modern Turkish history...
...But I'm just an academic biologist...
...Last October 21 a secularist intellectual, Ahmet Taner Kislali, was blown up by parties unknown after being targeted in AKIT...
...They consist not only of antievolution literature (including, bizarrely, Darwin's Antagonism Toward the Turks) but a broad spectrum of political titles embracing Holocaust denial, Jewish Freemasonic plans for world conquest, the secret role of Israel in the Kurdish rebellion, and the West's covert aims in the Balkans...
...A group of Islamist officers was cashiered, and finally—under significant pressure from the military—the Constitutional Court outlawed the Welfare Party on February 28, 1997...
...A century ago the question of Westernization was as burning an issue in Turkey as in Russia...
...But, Küçük assures the reader, defenders of "atheistic evolutionary theory are fighting for a cause that is already lost...
...I had it on the shelf...
...In 1983 the State Planning Organization called for a "Turkish-Islamic Synthesis," religious instruction was reintroduced in the public schools, and Darwinism was officially identified as a secularist notion that was to be discouraged...
...Arthur M. Shapiro, a previous contributor to The New Leader, is a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California's Davis campus...
...The organization is best known to many people for its sponsorship of "creation-evolution debates" on college campuses, typically pitting its warhorse Duane Gish against some rhetorically inept local professor of biology who ends up losing badly...
...In these materials it is quite candid about its Christian calling, even if in a secular context it still purports merely to represent "good science" with no religious overtones...
...Simultaneously, Turkey was flooded with the copious outpourings of the my sterious Harun Yahya, who has never been seen and may be a corporate alias for the BAV staff...
...It had been published in Istanbul, and the author was identified as Harun Yahya...
...While leaders of the NSP were singled out forprosecution and imprisonment, a significant part of its program was actually embraced by the new regime...
...This facilitated the entry of significant numbers of young Islamists into the universities and planted the seeds of a new Islamist elite...
...When secular Turkish scientists and intellectuals began mounting public opposition to the Islamists' "evolution strategy," they found themselves vilified as atheists, Marxists, Maoists, and worse in an organized campaign of defamation...
...It didn't explode...
...it was from 1994...
Vol. 83 • March 2000 • No. 1
