A program about Harun Yahya’s documentaries was aired in June 2006 on the Australian national broadcaster ABD Radio. The program covered parts of the documentaries based on Harun Yahya’s works, and the presenter, Margaret Coffey, offered the following comments regarding these sections. Gary Dargan, a New South Wales paleontologist and a director of the Islamic Education Trust of Australasia, also participated.
A transcript of part of the program reads as follows:
Audio from Harun Yahya DVD: Anyone with wisdom and conscience will understand when he examines the living things around him that they are created by a superior wisdom, knowledge and power.
Margaret Coffey: On ABC Radio National, this is Encounter… Harun Yahya is the pseudonym of the front person for an organisation based in Turkey. This organisation produces a prolific amount of audiovisual material and books with titles such as "Evolution Deceit". As Gary Dargan explained to the seminar, the material is produced in many languages and a Harun Yahya representative has visited Australia to promote the organisation"s ideology.
Audio from Harun Yahya DVD: Materialism, the philosophy which holds that everything is composed of matter, and which denies the existence of God, is actually the contemporary version of paganism ... This superstitious belief of materialism is called evolution ... the belief in evolution first introduced in the pagan cultures of the ancient Sumerians and then the ancient Greeks was, in a way, revived in the 19th century by a group of materialistic scientists and brought on to the world agenda - Charles Darwin is the best known of these scientists.
Gary Dargan: Harun Yahya"s views have become very, very strongly accepted in the Muslim world. In Nigeria, for instance, Harun Yahya"s textbooks are now being used in their biology syllabus. In NSW I have been contacted by a biology teacher at a high school saying, "I"ve got a lot of Muslim students, they quote Harun Yahya at me, and say all this evolution business is rubbish; we are not going to bother learning it." …
Audio from Harun Yahya DVD: However, as mentioned earlier, materialism is collapsing with a big bang.
Gary Dargan: … You go to just about every Islamic bookshop in any state of Australia and you will find basically shelves devoted to Harun Yahya: DVDs, videos, books and so on, and people have actually taken Harun Yahya"s books and printed them out for free distribution. And virtually all of his books are available free over the internet as well. You can actually download them.
Margaret Coffey: In your experience, do imams take his part or offer his views, his perspective on evolution…?
Gary Dargan: Well as far as I know most of the imams I"ve talked to reject evolution. … a lot of Muslims certainly do read his material and see his videos and DVDs.
