I've pointed out before that the most (reputedly) secular Muslim majority country, Turkey, is more friendly to Creationism and more religious than the United States. This is why I get really agitated by those who argue that Turkey should join the European Union, it isn't culturally appropriate. Europeans might be prejudiced against Turks because they're "oriental" (in the old sense) and Muslim, but that doesn't mean that Turks are just like any European in values. Liberal elites terrified of seeming prejudiced and Eurocentric don't want to acknowledge this generality of difference, but it is important to point out specific cultural shibboleths and markers which even they'll have a reflexive response to. For example, Meet Harun Yahya: The leading creationist in the Muslim world:
Creationist stories are now popping up in Turkish high-school science textbooks, and some government officials in the AKP, the ruling Islamic party, freely criticize evolution. In Ankara, the government's point man on religious issues, Mehmet Gormez, told me, "All the holy texts say human beings are created by God. I think evolutionary theory is not scientific, but ideological." ... Why Islamic creationism has exploded in Turkey is a complicated story that may have as much to do with politics as religion. Unlike most Muslim countries, which simply ignore the science of life's origins, Turkey's high schools have taught evolution for decades--the legacy of Ataturk's campaign to secularize Turkey's public culture. Creationism has become a way for political Islamists to attack the secular elite that governed Turkey until the recent rise of the AKP. Oktar's own agenda isn't confined to evolution. He's calling for a "Turkish-Islamic Union," a Turkish super-state that would stretch from Kazakhstan to Indonesia and western Africa--a revamped Ottoman Empire for today's Muslims. So how much influence does Harun Yahya actually have? I asked a number of well-connected journalists, academics, and businessmen--members of the secular elite. Some described his political impact as minimal, while others lamented his success at getting creationist materials into schools and at persuading the Turkish courts to ban Web sites that criticize him. Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Istanbul University and a prominent commentator on Turkish affairs, called Harun Yahya's organization "cultish" and said that it entraps young men and women and turns them against their families. He said one of his students was a Harun Yahya acolyte who'd became a virtual prisoner; when she took her exams, two men hovered nearby so she couldn't speak to anyone else.
This is democracy. Science might not be democratic, but culture is. I freely grant that the Muslim world needs to be graded on a curve. But allowing Turkey into the EU would be a form of social promotion (I'm moderately skeptical of the scalability of the European Union into Eastern Europe as it is, but at least those nations are smaller and culturally more similar, with many such as Slovenia and Estonia at a higher index of human development).
