{"id":1244,"date":"2009-09-19T19:00:44","date_gmt":"2009-09-19T23:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=1244"},"modified":"2009-09-19T19:00:44","modified_gmt":"2009-09-19T23:00:44","slug":"the-fullest-yahya-investigation-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2009\/09\/the-fullest-yahya-investigation-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fullest Yahya Investigation Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Halil Arda has done a great service with a new report in the New Humanist<\/em><\/a> about Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist whom I interviewed last October. He fortunately had the resources and connections to reveal far more than I was able in<\/a> my<\/a> articles<\/a> on the man. Nevertheless, I am pleased to see that he found my work useful:<\/p>\n

As the American journalist Nathan Schneider argued, to judge Yahya\u2019s message on its scientific content alone misses the point: \u201cits power, for those who are not scientifically literate, lies in its vision of redemption.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If his information is correct, Arda adds quite a bit to what we now know about Yahya and his organization. He rightly represents Yahya’s circle as a new religious movement first and a creationism promoter second. And he seems to confirm Salman Hameed’s suspicion<\/a> that Yahya thinks he’s the Mahdi:<\/p>\n

Some, like his former colleague Islamist author Edip Yuksel, who was imprisoned in 1986 at the same time, believe Oktar was faking [insanity] to avoid compulsory military service and criminal charges. (\u201cWhich is ironic,\u201d wrote Yuksel, \u201csince he was indeed mentally ill; he was a delusional maniac.\u201d) Already by this point, Yuksel reports, Oktar believed himself to be the Mehdi [an alternate spelling of Mahdi], the messiah foretold in Sunni theology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s much more: sex, cocaine, court convictions, and fancy clothes. The works, in far greater detail than I was able to unearth. While I wish Arda had gone further to explore, sympathetically, why people are so drawn to Yahya, his expos\u00e9 offers a great deal for Yahya observers to work with. I feel very much in his debt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\"Halil Arda has done a great service with a new report in the New Humanist<\/em><\/a> about Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist whom I interviewed last October. He fortunately had the resources and connections to reveal far more than I was able in<\/a> my<\/a> articles<\/a> on the man. Nevertheless, I am pleased to see that he found my work useful:<\/p>\n

As the American journalist Nathan Schneider argued, to judge Yahya\u2019s message on its scientific content alone misses the point: \u201cits power, for those who are not scientifically literate, lies in its vision of redemption.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If his information is correct, Arda adds quite a bit to what we now know about Yahya and his organization. He rightly represents Yahya’s circle as a new religious movement first and a creationism promoter second. And he seems to confirm Salman Hameed’s suspicion<\/a> that Yahya thinks he’s the Mahdi:<\/p>\n

Some, like his former colleague Islamist author Edip Yuksel, who was imprisoned in 1986 at the same time, believe Oktar was faking [insanity] to avoid compulsory military service and criminal charges. (\u201cWhich is ironic,\u201d wrote Yuksel, \u201csince he was indeed mentally ill; he was a delusional maniac.\u201d) Already by this point, Yuksel reports, Oktar believed himself to be the Mehdi [an alternate spelling of Mahdi], the messiah foretold in Sunni theology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s much more: sex, cocaine, court convictions, and fancy clothes. The works, in far greater detail than I was able to unearth. While I wish Arda had gone further to explore, sympathetically, why people are so drawn to Yahya, his expos\u00e9 offers a great deal for Yahya observers to work with. I feel very much in his debt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1244"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1245,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244\/revisions\/1245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}