One of Spain’s main dailies, the Barcelona-based El Periodico, covered Adnan Oktar’s works on the subject of evolution in its 10 June, 2007, edition. The report devoted considerable space to the Atlas of Creation, which has provoked a great response worldwide, and to Adnan Oktar’s recent press conference held in Istanbul for foreign press. Written by Andres Mourenza and titled “Author of the dispatched ‘Atlas of Creation’ shows his face,” the report contained the following statements:
“Adnan Oktar, a Turk, has sent an impressive and exciting anti-Darwinist book to the University of Barcelona.
Last February, several professors of the University of Barcelona received luxurious copies of Atlas of Creation, greater than 700 pages in size and weighing more than 5 kilos. Before that several other European universities had been the targets of the mysterious shipments, signed with the pen name Harun Yahya and opposing the theory of evolution.
‘Gentlemen, evolution never happened. If it had, then it would be written in the Qur’an, the Bible and the Torah.’ So says Adnan Oktar, who uses that pen name. He revealed his face at a press conference on a luxury yacht sailing along the Bosphorus last Friday.
... Oktar began writing his works in the 1980s. Like his American colleagues, he believes that God [Allah] created the world in six days and that fossil findings dating back thousands of years belonging to species still in existence today prove that there has been no evolution.
… ‘The idea that “Only a few people can understand Darwinism; it is so complex that only scientists can comprehend it,” is a deception,’ he stated. The fact that Oktar, occupied with art and philosophy, received no formal scientific training, posed no obstacle to his writing this book. ‘There is no need for formal academic training in order to see that Darwinism is wrong and to grasp the existence of Allah,’ he says. ‘It is actually Darwinism that lacks any scientific foundation,’ he adds.
Oktar appears before the press wearing a spotless white suit and an Ottoman-style golden belt buckle and tiepin, and his companions look very much the same. Although he holds very different ideas and has twice been imprisoned and once spent time in a mental hospital, thanks to his fine way of speaking he has a well educated group of followers gathered in a number of foundations...
‘We shall continue to send books to countries where Darwinism is more deeply rooted, and we have prepared Atlas of Creation for Russia and China,’ says Harun Yahya.
The Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church Are among the Much-Discussed Author’s Customers
Seven million books comprising various titles written by Adnan Oktar under the pen name Harun Yahya have been distributed free of charge, and a further 8 million have been sold globally in 150 countries. Esi, a representative of Global Publishing, the sole authorized distributor of Oktar’s works, and a man who has devoted his life to distributing these works worldwide, issued a statement on Friday, saying: ‘We send books to Muslims, but there are also Christian and Jewish groups that request books from us for distribution without references from the Qur’an. Our clients include the Orthodox Churches in Russia and Serbia, and various groups from the Vatican.’ The Spanish translation of these books is done in Argentina, but it was the English-language version of Atlas of Creation that was received by at least 11 professors from the University of Barcelona.”
