Building Bridges With Islam
I noted with interest that , after all the bad feeling and conflict between the Islamic world and the west, here is a story that shows mainstream America has something in common with Islamic thought. At Yahoo News, I read about how Turkey made the teaching of creationism mandatory in their schools back in 1985. Since then, they have made great progress and are now starting to spread their message outside of Turkey!
Now they are sending their glossy, high-production value 768-page “Atlas of Creation” - it weighs more than 13 pounds!- to several European countries and the US.
“Every Islamic bookshop I know of stocks Harun Yahya’s material. It is so glossily produced. It is very attractive and very colorful and outclasses everything else,” says Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim British Council, speaking by phone from London.
“It is having an effect. Even among Muslim medical students there are a number now who are speaking out against Darwin,” the story tells us. And that may not be all bad–after all, the Arabs were known to have better medical practices than the Europeans for a long time. So joining in the Islamic fundamentalist worldview might not be without it’s bright side!
And, as an added bonus, there may be some additional social gains to listening to our fundamentalist brethren:The “author” for the book was recently quoted as saying “Hitler, Mao, and Lenin were Darwinists. At the root of wild capitalism is also Darwinism. I think if we no longer believe in Darwinism, people will no longer be conditioned to believe in those things. “He continues by saying “Folks, there is no such thing as what you call evolution. If there was, it would be in the Holy Bible or the Koran…What I’m saying is true. They cannot disprove it.” This sounds like a lot of what is heard here in America, and isn’t it good to know that we have some commonalities upon which to build a new set of understandings? And, we seem to be coming closer together!
In a recent Science magazine survey Turkey had the second-lowest acceptance rate of the theory of evolution. But don’t worry-the United States had the lowest.
Yes, the foregoing has been a bit tongue-in-cheek.
At this point, it might be good to note that the “author” of the Atlas, who apparently is not the author at all, but rather is the front man for a politically motivated writing group, is 51-year-old former interior-design student named Adnan Oktar. He uses the pen-name Harun Yahya.
In opposition to him, curiously enough, are some …(wait for it………wait for it……..) scientists!
While giving creationism a scientific veneer, “Scientifically speaking, the whole Harun Yahya corpus is a bunch of nonsense, but it is unfortunately very popular,” says Taner Edis, a Turkish physicist who teaches at Truman State University in Missouri.
Professor Edis says the success of the Harun Yahya books, at least in the Islamic world, can be attributed to a need for harmonizing modern life with traditional Islamic beliefs.
“Something has to reconcile these two things and it becomes very attractive when someone comes out with a well-packaged message, that they can have both – be fully modern and at the same have science … affirm most of their very deeply held religious and ethical perceptions,” says Edis, whose “An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam” was published by Prometheus Books this spring.
“That’s a pretty attractive package and that’s mostly what the Harun Yahya material provides,” he says.
I like what Professor Edis says- it is the desire to reconcile two disparate world views that makes people try to make faith and science be one. They aren’t, of course, but I’ve been human enough to want things to be a certain way because it would be more comforting, or it would just make things easier, and for once, just once, couldn’t things be easy? I can get that. Maybe you can too?
For a little while. Then I have to do the hard work of facing the truth, and living in the world that is here and now. Not when the Koran was written. Not when the books of the Bible were chosen, edited, and presented to the faithful.Those books are beautiful, they contain profound truths, and they are available in handsome, glossy, well-bound editions that you can be proud to own. But they are not the whole truth. They are not enough to be taken literally when faced with the truth of today.
I found it good to know that there are also people in the Islamic world who are working to recognize that scientific knowledge and spiritual faith can both exist, but that they are not the same territory.
“The general state of science education is very bad in the sense that evolution and creationism are taught together, and they can’t be taught together. If they are, no scientific thinking can be established in these students,” says Aykut Kence, a professor of biology at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University.
“We are going to fall behind the modern countries in terms of development, economy, culture. Everything.”
Attractive packaging. Temptation. It’s the old apple trick again. This garden we’re in may not seem so good, most days. But I’m guessing that it beats the fundamentalist wasteland into which we would be cast out.
Be brave, and be the best of your humanity.
Nick
