Adnan Oktar

Adnan Oktar (born 2 February 1956), also known as Adnan Hoca or Harun Yahya, is a Turkish cult leader, preacher, creationist, conspiracy theorist, and pamphleteer.

Adnan Oktar was born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1956, and grew up there through his high school years.

While in high school he studied the works of Islamic scholars like Said Nursî, a Kurdish scholar who wrote Risale-i Nur, an extensive tafsir (Qur'anic commentary) that includes a comprehensive political and religious ideology.

According to Oktar biographer Anne Ross Solberg, he grew up in a "relatively affluent secular family".

In 1979, Oktar moved to Istanbul and entered Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University to study architecture.

It was here, according to Solberg, that he became fully engaged in religious activism.

Following the Turkish coup e'tat in September 1980, Oktar began regularly attending the Molla Çelebi Mosque in nearby Fındıklı.

Edip Yüksel, who knew Oktar during those years, described him as a "Sunni zealot."

By the early 1980s, Oktar had begun disseminating his views on Islam to young university students from socially-connected, wealthy Istanbul families.

Oktar continued building up his community for the remainder of the 1980s and into the 1990s.

His followers were especially active recruiting at summer resorts along the Sea of Marmara.

Two themes one ex-follower remembered from this period were a strong hatred of Jews and Freemasons and, in a move away from orthodox Islam, abandoning belief in hadith: "'Suddenly Adnan Hodja repudiated all oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of Muhammad (hadith) and decided that the Koran would be the only point of reference. Henceforth, he reduced the five daily prayers to three, and he dropped the veiling of women. He told us the Mehdi would emerge from Turkey, and he would come with an army of youth. He never said that he was the Mehdi himself, but we all believed that he was.'"

Oktar claims that, due to the political upheaval in Turkey during this period, he was unable to continue his studies and so devoted his energy to writing books upon leaving school.

Between twenty and thirty of these followers formed a group around Oktar between 1982 and 1984, soon thereafter joined by newly-converted private high school students who also came from affluent backgrounds.

Yüksel said Oktar presented "a refined and urbanized version" of Nursi's teachings "to the children of the privileged class", avoiding a high pressure or traditional, old fashioned approach.

Like Nursi, Oktar argued against Marxism, communism and materialistic philosophy, but attached special importance to refuting evolution and Darwinism, as he believed they were being used to promote materialism and atheism.

Oktar personally put money into a pamphlet entitled the Theory of Evolution, which promoted pseudoscientific arguments against evolution.

In 1986 Oktar enrolled in the philosophy department of Istanbul University and began holding lectures, in which many students, mostly from neighboring Boğaziçi University, sought to participate.

Oktar's name also began to appear regularly in the press, including a cover story in Nokta magazine.

Later that year he published a 550-page book titled Judaism and Freemasonry, based on the antisemitic canard that state offices, universities, political groups and media were influenced by a "hidden group" seeking to undermine "the spiritual, religious, and moral values of the Turkish people and make them like animals."

Oktar was arrested on the grounds of promoting a theocratic revolution and was detained for nineteen months, though he was never formally charged.

He spent ten months in a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, but he maintains that he was a political prisoner who was punished because of the publication of Judaism and Freemasonry and not mentally ill.

In 1990, Oktar founded the Science Research Foundation (Bilim Araştırma Vakfı, or BAV).

(Oktar ran and also served as honorary president of both BAV and the later Millî Değerleri Koruma Vakfı) As reported by Solberg, members of the BAV discarded their "overtly Islamic garments" in favor of "designer clothing" and "proclaimed themselves supporters of the ideals" of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, despite the fact that Atatürk was secularist.

The BAV held conferences and seminars in which Oktar blamed political and social problems on Darwinism and materialism.

Based his own experiences and conversations with ex-members of the BAV, Yüksel characterizes the group as "a complete cult" with "all the criteria of a cult as you would define it today ... isolation, entire control of the lives of the cult members".

In 1994, the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) won control of the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara.

The new mayors – one of whom was future president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – made business agreements with Oktar in exchange for political support.

The following year, Oktar founded the Foundation for Protection of National Values (Millî Değerleri Koruma Vakfı, or MDKV), through which he networked with other Turkish nationalist organizations and individuals on shared issues.

Following the 1997 Turkish military memorandum, the Welfare Party disbanded and the new government, headed by Erdoğan, distanced itself from Oktar going forward.

In 1998 Oktar distributed a new book, The Evolution Deceit.

The following year he was arrested and charged with extortion and forming a criminal enterprise.

Between the 2000s and late 2010s, he was engaged in "a massive campaign" of proselytizing Westerners to Islam, producing dozens of vividly illustrated books.

On 17 November 2022, he was sentenced to 8,658 years in prison for leading a criminal gang, engaging in political and military espionage, sexual abuse of minors, and other charges.

Oktar filed more than 5,000 lawsuits against individuals for defamation from 2005 to 2015, which led to the blocking of a number of prominent websites in Turkey.

In the West, before his arrest and trial, Oktar was perhaps best known for his unsolicited sending thousands of copies of his creationist book, The Atlas of Creation, to French schools and universities in January 2007, and several months later to American scientists, members of Congress, science museums and schools.

Prior to his arrest, Oktar established and ran two organizations: Bilim Araştırma Vakfı (BAV), which promoted creationism, and Millî Değerleri Koruma Vakfı which worked domestically on a variety of moral issues.

In more recent years, Oktar has preached "the true Islam" based on the Quran on his television channel, A9 TV.

Oktar's organization is commonly referred to as a cult, and he has been described by Vice magazine as the "most notorious cult leader in Turkey."

He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, but the verdict was appealed and in May 2010 it was overturned.