Since the beginning of this century, it was impossible, to the visitor of the Muslim world, to stroll through a bookstore or to consult a stall of books in the street without falling on at least one of the cheap publications of the prolific Harun Yahia. Under this pseudonym was hidden Adnan Oktar, born in 1956 in Ankara and became the guru of a creationist sect, whose disciples had as a legal facade two “foundations”, one for “scientific research”, the other for the “Defense of national values”.
This pamphleteer had first distinguished himself by his obsessive denunciation of the supposed links between Zionism and Freemasonry, which would work in concert in Saper the Muslim identity of Turkey. But he then decided to concentrate his attacks on Darwinism, accused of being the source of all the ills of modern society. Now at the head of a real media empire, Oktar, alias Yahia could count, in the United States, on the support of the creationist networks of the evangelical right.
a combat messianism
Adnan Oktar chose for his nickname to claim two prophets of Islam: Harun, the Aaron of the Bible (whose tomb is revered on a Jordanian summit close to Petra) and Yahia, the Jean-Baptiste Christians (whose beheaded head is supposed to rest at the heart of the Omeyyad mosque, in Damascus). He affirms that “the day of judgment, unlike many beliefs, approaches and is not in a distant future”. He sees signs of the end of time in the fire of oil wells in Kuwait in 1991, or in reducing the flow of Euphrates, due to the construction of a mega-barrage in Turkey.
He exalts the figure of Jesus, the Issa of the Koran, considered as the penultimate prophet of Islam, which will triumph over the antechrist during an apocalyptic battle in Syria. This exaltation of Jesus and this demonization of the Antichrist allow him to consolidate his relations with American creationists, who relay his aggressive campaign against Darwinism.
oktar/yahia has a powerful publishing house, Book Global, doomed to the planetary broadcast of his “works” with “Islamic morality” boxes (ten books accompanied by ten multilingual DVDs) and special offers for children. These books, sold at low prices, are naturally published in Turkish, Arabic or Ourdou, but also in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch, in Danish, Albanian, Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian. Their titles are without commentary: the lie of evolution, the creation of the universe, the disasters caused to humanity by Darwinism, the miracle of creation in DNA or the collapse of the theory of ‘evolution in twenty questions.
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