Abstract
Islamic creationism has been very successful in Turkey, finding official as well as grassroots support in an environment shaped by neoliberal Islamism. Opposition to evolution has many local, Turkish and Islamic political rationales. However, as comparison with creationism in the United States demonstrates, creationism also draws political sustenance from a more universal rhetoric of modern conservatism, emphasizing markets, organic communities, and a pragmatic view of science as infrastructure for business and technology.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abbott, Alison. 2009. Turkish Scientists Claim Darwin Censorship. Nature. http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090310/full/news.2009.150.html. Accessed 7 Oct 2016.
Akdoğan, Yalçın. 2004. AK Parti ve Muhafazakar Demokrasi. İstanbul: Alfa Yayınları.
Akyol, Mustafa. 2011. Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. New York: W.W. Norton.
Atasoy, Yıldız. 2009. Islam’s Marriage with Neoliberalism: State Transformation in Turkey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ateş, Süleyman. 1991. Gerçek Din Bu, vol. 1. İstanbul: Yeni Ufuklar Neşriyat.
Aydın, Hasan. 2007. Evrim (bilim) – Yaratılış (din) çatışması üzerine kimi düşünceler. Bilim ve Gelecek 39: 20–25.
———. 2008. Postmodern Çağda İslam ve Bilim. İstanbul: Bilim ve Gelecek Kitaplığı.
Bell, James, et al. 2013. The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
Blancke, Stefaan, Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, and Peter C. Kjærgaard, eds. 2014. Creationism in Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brown, C. Mackenzie. 2012. Hindu Perspectives on Evolution: Darwin, Dharma, and Design. New York: Routledge.
Brown, Phillip, Hugh Lauder, and David Ashton. 2011. The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes. New York: Oxford University Press.
Coyne, Jerry A. 2012. Science, Religion, and Society: The Problem of Evolution in America. Evolution 66: 2654–2663. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2012.01664.x.
Edgerton, David. 2007. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press.
Edis, Taner. 1994. Islamic Creationism in Turkey. Creation/Evolution 34: 1–12.
———. 1999. Cloning Creationism in Turkey. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 19 (6): 30–35.
———. 2006. Science and Nonbelief. Westport: Greenwood Press.
———. 2007. An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
———. 2016. Islam Evolving: Radicalism, Reformation, and the Uneasy Relationship with the Secular West. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Edis, Taner, and Saouma BouJaoude. 2014. Rejecting Materialism: Responses to Modern Science in the Muslim Middle East. In International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching, ed. Michael R. Matthews, vol. III. Dordrecht: Springer.
Eisenach, Eldon J. 2000. The Next Religious Establishment: National Identity and Political Theology in Post-Protestant America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Elshakry, Marwa. 2013. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Eve, Raymond A., and Francis B. Harrold. 1990. The Creationist Movement in Modern America. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Folbre, Nancy. 2010. Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education. New York: The New Press.
Forrest, Barbara, and Paul R. Gross. 2007. Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gambetta, Diego, and Steffen Hertog. 2009. Why Are There so Many Engineers Among Islamic Radicals? European Journal of Sociology 50 (2): 201–230.
Gilbert, James. 1997. Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gluckman, Peter D., Alan Beedle, and Mark Hanson. 2009. Principles of Evolutionary Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press.
Göle, Nilüfer. 2000. İslam ve Modernlik Üzerine Melez Desenler. İstanbul: Metis Yayınları.
GOP Platform. 2012. http://www.scribd.com/doc/104221532/2012-Gop-Platform. Accessed 7 Oct 2016.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: W.W. Norton.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Malden: Polity Press.
Hameed, Salman. 2008. Bracing for Islamic Creationism. Science 322: 1637–1638.
Hendrick, Joshua D. 2013. Küreselleşme, İslami Aktivizm, ve Türkiye’de Pasif Devrim: Fethullah Gülen Örneği. In Neoliberalizm, İslamcı Sermayenin Yükselişi ve AKP, ed. Neşecan Balkan, Erol Balkan, and Ahmet Öncü. İstanbul: Yordam Kitap.
Kalleberg, Arne. 2011. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment in the United States, 1970s–2000s. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Keen, Steve. 2011. Debunking Economics—Revised and Expanded Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? London: Zed Books.
Koç, Nurettin. 2006. Laik Eğitimden Şeriatçı Eğitime: Ulusal Eğitimde Çöküş Süreci. İstanbul: Berfin Yayınları.
Kotan, Betül. 2006. Bakan Çelik: Yaratılış aynen kalacak. Radikal. http://www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?haberno=180408. Accessed 7 Oct 2016.
Lopez, Donald S., Jr. 2008. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lordoğlu, Kuvvet, and M. Hakan Koçak. 2015. AKP Döneminde İstihdam, İşgücü ve İşsizlik. In Himmet, Fıtrat, Piyasa: AKP Döneminde Sosyal Politika, ed. Meryem Koray and Aziz Çelik. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları.
McCauley, Robert N. 2011. Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. New York: Oxford University Press.
Meyer, Stephen C. 2009. Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. New York: HarperOne.
Mustafa Efendi, Harputizâde Hacı. 2014. In Red ve Isbât: Alman Feylesoflarından Louis Büchner’in Ahmed Nebil, Baha Tevfik Efendiler Tarafından Tercüme Olunan Madde ve Kuvvet Nâm Eserine Reddiyedir, ed. Ibrahim Hakkı Kaynak and Ali Utku. İstanbul: Çizgi Kitabevi.
Newfield, Christopher. 2008. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Numbers, Ronald L. 2006. The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nye, David E. 1996. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Oakeshott, Michael. 1966. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge, UK: The University Press.
Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Ozan, Ebru Deniz. 2012. Gülme Sırası Bizde: 12 Eylül’e Giderken Sermaye Sınıfı Kriz ve Devlet. İstanbul: Metis Yayınları.
Özipek, Bekir Berat. 2011. Muhafazakarlık: Akıl, Toplum, Siyaset. İstanbul: Timaş Yayınları.
Parla, Taha, and Andrew Davison. 2004. Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey. New York: Syracuse University Press.
Reich, Robert. 1992. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Riexinger, Martin. 2008. Propagating Islamic Creationism on the Internet. Masaryk University Journal of Law and Technology 2 (2): 99–112.
———. 2009. Reactions of South Asian Muslims to the Theory of Evolution. Welt des Islams 49 (2): 212–247.
Sayın, Ümit, and Aykut Kence. 1999. Islamic Scientific Creationism. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 19 (6): 18–20, 25–29.
Scott, Eugenie C. 2004. Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sehat, David. 2011. The Myth of American Religious Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shamos, Morris H. 1995. The Myth of Scientific Literacy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Sloan, Richard P. 2006. Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Solberg, Anne Ross. 2013. The Mahdi Wears Armani: An Analysis of the Harun Yahya Enterprise. Huddinge: Södertörns Högskola.
Stearns, Stephen C., and Jacob C. Koella, eds. 2008. Evolution in Health and Disease, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Teazis, Christos. 2010. İkincilerin Cumhuriyeti: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi. İstanbul: Mızrak Yayınları.
Texas GOP. 2012. http://www.texasgop.org/wp-content/themes/rpt/images/2012Platform_Final.pdf. Accessed 7 Oct 2016.
Tuğal, Cihan. 2009. Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Yahya, Harun. 2002. Fascism: The Bloody Ideology of Darwinism. İstanbul: Kültür Yayınları.
———. 2011. Darwinist Propaganda Techniques. İstanbul: Global Publishing.
Yalçınoğlu, P. 2009. Impacts of Anti-evolutionist Movements on Educational Policies and Practices in USA and Turkey. İlköğretim Online 8 (1): 254–267.
Yankaya, Dilek. 2014. Yeni İslâmî Burjuvazi: Türk Modeli. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları.
Young, Matt, and Taner Edis. 2004. Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to Eugenie Scott and Joshua Rosenau for comments and discussions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Edis, T. (2020). The Politics of Islamic Opposition to Evolution in Turkey. In: Brown, C.M. (eds) Asian Religious Responses to Darwinism. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37340-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37340-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37339-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37340-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)