Those of us who live in the industrialized West have become used to a particular relationship between science and religion. Whatever intellectual tensions there may be between modern science and supernatural belief, the institutions of science and religion have largely learned to keep out of each others’ hair. Scientists shy away from issues of morality and identity, while liberal religions let scientists freely investigate the world. Only conservative, fundamentalist religious movements upset this equilibrium, and they enjoy power only in exceptional places such as the United States. Fundamentalist resistance to science is most visible in public debates over certain hot-button issues, most notably Darwinian evolution.

In the Muslim world, however, such a view of science and religion is not as accurate. Conservative Muslims—who have more political and cultural clout than their liberal rivals—are not as willing to grant science autonomy, insisting that knowledge of the world should be constrained by revelation and guided by moral convictions. So the interaction of science and Islam often looks more like the open conflict between science and conservative Christianity than the cold peace between science and liberal religion. Both the Muslim elites and the general population often endorse pseudoscientific beliefs that protect their faith. For example, large numbers of Muslims are drawn to claims that verses in the Quran anticipate modern scientific and technological achievements. Many Muslim intellectuals are attracted by proposals to “Islamize science.” And today, Muslim populations generate the strongest resistance to Darwinian evolution. The world’s most successful creationists are those who rise up to defend Islam, not Christianity.

Creationism was not always very visible in Islamic countries, mainly because Darwinian ideas did not penetrate far enough to generate a reaction. But for centuries now, Muslims have been trying hard to catch up to modernity. They have recognized how science and technology were integral to the economic and military advantage enjoyed by Western colonial powers, and debated how knowledge can be imported without damaging the integrity of Muslim cultures. And many among the Muslim elites have decided that a large degree of westernization is inescapable. Where westernization has been most vigorous, Darwinian ideas have also been most available, threatening the common Muslim conviction that nature is a divine design. This has inspired religious resistance.

The example of Turkey is most illuminating, as Turkey has been the most western-oriented of Muslim countries, but has recently taken the lead in Islamic creationism. The Turkish Revolution of the 1920’s established official secularism, and evolution entered the curriculum. Still, evolution was a relatively small offense against religion in an educational system that promoted the privatization of religious sentiment. Until the 1960’s, Turkey presented a picture of grudging but gradual secularization, with little significant creationist literature and with anti-evolutionary activity confined to the subculture of a strictly observant, self-consciously orthodox minority.

In the 1970’s, as in the rest of the Muslim world, political Islam started to gain strength in Turkey. Evolution became a minor item in the culture war, a way for Islamists to demonstrate opposition to secular life without naming official secularism as a target. But creationism came into its own in the mid 1980’s, when religious conservatives gained control of the Turkish Ministry of Education. Conservative Muslims thought evolutionary ideas were morally corrosive, yet they found themselves in an environment where science commanded significant cognitive authority. So they needed a way to suggest that evolution was a scientifically dubious idea, a fraud. They found the resources they needed in Protestant “scientific creationism,” and invoked Christian creationists just as the secularists tended to rely on Western scientific authorities. While the Muslims downplayed some features of Protestant creationism such as a young earth and flood geology, they adopted the bulk of the anti-evolutionary debating points developed by their Christian counterparts. Indeed, the Education Ministry had many instances of “scientific creationist” literature officially translated and made available to high schools and teachers. Since this mid-80’s breakthrough, Turkish textbooks have often contained anti-Darwinian or explicitly creationist material. The creationist paragraphs disappeared during the infrequent periods when secular leftists shared power and reappeared when the Islamists returned to government. At present a moderate Islamist party holds power and looks likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

The constituency for creationism is not traditionalists but modernized people, even if they remain theologically conservative. It is precisely because they want to take their place in the modern world, where mastering technology is the key to success, that creationists fashion a pseudoscience that harmonizes science and their religious convictions. For example, the popular “Nur” religious movement has been instrumental in the development of Islamic creationism in Turkey. The Nur movement is noted for its modern character, enthusiasm for technology, and embrace of capitalism. Nur adherents do not depart far from traditional doctrines, but their leadership structure and modes of religious participation are decidedly non-traditional. Due in part to the worldly success and influence of Nur and similar movements, many anti-evolutionary leaders and intellectuals are professionals, even academics. This, in fact, is a major difference between Islamic and Christian creationism. In Turkey and in other Muslim countries, anti-evolutionary views find plenty of elite support, including among academic theologians and scientists. In the West, the more sophisticated “intelligent design” variety of creationism exists on the fringes of intellectual life. In the Muslim world, intelligent design ideas are respectable intellectual options.

The last ten years have seen a deepening of the popular appeal of Turkish creationism and its international spread. The central figure in this development is Harun Yahya, a pseudonym that serves as a brand name for an ubiquitous, well-funded, and media-intensive form of creationist propaganda. In content, there is nothing new in the Yahya material: worthless arguments and distortions of science often copied from Christian anti-evolution literature, presented with a conservative Muslim emphasis. The range and production quality of this material, however, is impressive. Large numbers of glossy books, magazines, videos, web sites, and public events make Yahya’s simple, intuitively appealing creationism available to a large public. None of this material is marked out as being religious literature of interest only to a conservative Muslim subculture; from its presentation style to its use of everyday language, Yahya material is designed to be marketed to ordinary, modern Muslims who need not be attracted to strictly observant varieties of Islam. Furthermore, Yahya material is artificially cheap, and is often distributed free of cost. Clearly the Yahya enterprise has considerable financial backing, though the source of these funds remains unknown.

Turkish scientists have tried to counter such popular creationism, but in the public arena, the creationists have won. Building on their success in Turkey, the Yahya brand of creationists have more recently gone global. Today, Yahya material is available in languages spoken by Islamic populations all over the world. Yahya books are prominently displayed in Islamic bookstores in London, used in classrooms in Pakistan, promoted by speaking tours in Indonesia. Very recently, as a publicity stunt, the Yahya organization mailed copies of a volume of a typically lavishly produced encyclopedia called Atlas of Creation to scientists and educators in Europe and North America, drawing media attention outside of Islamic circles. We now have a global variety of Islamic creationism that goes beyond long-standing Muslim resistance to Darwinian ideas. Many modern Muslims are attracted to claims that Darwinian evolution is scientifically false, and that science, properly done, supports Quranic notions of special creation.

Nevertheless, Muslims hold a variety of views on evolution; Yahya-style creationists do not speak for all. Some Muslim thinkers accept evolution in the sense of descent with modification, provided that this evolution is explicitly divinely guided. Even such liberals, however, reject the Darwinian, naturalistic view of evolution that is current in natural science. Indeed, it is safe to say that among devout Muslims, naturalistic evolution is religiously unacceptable, and the evolution of complexity through natural mechanisms alone, without the direction of a divine intelligence, is seen as an intellectual absurdity. The Harun Yahya material has no scholarly standing whatsoever. But more sophisticated anti-evolution views have wide currency among serious Muslim intellectuals.

Moreover, in the Muslim world, defenders of Darwinian evolution are associated with political secularism. And in the last few decades, secularism has been increasingly discredited as an alien cultural imposition, a tool of despotic regimes, and the ideology of westernized elites who have lost touch with the pious bulk of Muslim populations. In European history, the development of popular democracy included an anticlerical element, so that science, secularism and democracy have often been allied. Among Muslims, however, anti-evolution sentiments belong to political moderates and democratic forces more than to stereotypical militants. In Muslim lands, more democracy typically means religious populism, less political secularism, and a tension between science and democracy.

Overall, this means that creationism is likely to remain strong in Muslim populations. The prospects for a western-style accommodation between science and religion, where each has their separate sphere, are doubtful. Culturally and politically, conservative interpretations of Islam are very strong, and conservative Muslims see little reason to back off from the ideal of religion regulating all aspects of life. Revelation, Muslim thinkers usually insist, must condition how we understand the world. All this may change, as this is a time of experimentation and rapid religious change in the Muslim world. Political Islam may yet fail, especially in its promise to make Muslims equal players in the realm of technology-driven development. Conservative failure could create more space for more liberal versions of Islam and for the autonomy of science. But in the short term, the Islamic world will continue to harbor very serious tensions between science and religion.

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Taner Edis is associate professor of physics at Truman State University, Kirksville, MO, USA. You can find out more in his most recent book, An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam (Prometheus Books, 2007).