of 17 March, taking into account time spent in jail, the appeal court has "decided to release 68 defendants", but not "16 high-profile defendants, including Oktar". After retrial he was sentenced to 8,658 years in prison. Writings, productions, and beliefs Oktar has written numerous books under the pen name Harun Yahya. "Harun" refers to the biblical Aaron and "Yahya" refers to the New Testament John the Baptist. His publications argue against evolution. They assert that evolution denies the existence of God, abolishes moral values, and promotes materialism and communism. Truman State University physicist Taner Edis, who was born in Turkey, says the secret to BAV's success is the huge popularity of the Harun Yahya books. "They're fairly lavishly produced, on good-quality paper with full-color illustrations all over the place," he says. "They're trying to compete with any sort of science publication you can find in the Western world. And in a place like Turkey, Yahya books look considerably better-published than most scientific publications." Many of his books have been made into high-resolution videos which are freely downloadable on the Internet. Creationism Oktar has been called "fiercely opposed to the theory of evolution" and Darwinism, which he believes undermines religious belief, thus leading to "the discord, atheism, terrorism and extreme political ideologies" of contemporary life. The spread of organized Christian creationism to Islam began in the 1980s, when the Muslim minister of education in Turkey turned to the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), a Christian institution then located near San Diego, California, for help in developing twofold curriculum that would teach evolution and creationism side by side. In 1990, the Science Research Foundation (BAV in Turkish) was formed in Istanbul, headed by Oktar. For many years Oktar drew on the writings of young earth Christian creationists to develop his case against evolution. Oktar later produced material which was more similar to Intelligent Design. In fact, Harun Yahya's website was listed as an "Islamic intelligent design" website by the Discovery Institute. However Oktar does not embrace use of the term 'Intelligent Design' due to its lack of specific mention of God, calling it 'another of Satan's snares'. In early 1998, the BAV launched its first campaign against evolution. Thousands of free copies of Oktar's book, The Evolution Deceit, and the booklets based on this book were distributed throughout Turkey. They regularly ran full-page ads against evolution in daily Turkish newspapers and even