Istanbul and entered Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. According to The Mahdi Wears Armani, it was only there that he became really "involved in religious activism". Following the coup of September 1980 in Turkey a military junta was installed, and the environment in Turkey was one of political and cultural instability, violence and repression, Cold War politics, and a clash between Kemalist secular modernisers and a rising tide of Islamic militancy. In this environment Oktar regularly attended the Molla Mosque in Fındıklı locality, close to the academy of fine arts where he studied interior architecture, to pray regardless of threats. Edip Yüksel, who knew him during those years, described him as a "Sunni zealot." Sect-Foundation In the early 1980s, Oktar preached his views on Islam to young students around him from socially connected, wealthy Istanbul families, employing his "undoubted charisma (something even his most ardent opponents concede)". 20 to 30 of them formed a group between 1982 and 1984. They were joined by newly religious private high school students who were from families with similar higher-class economic backgrounds. Yüksel said Oktar presented "a refined and urbanized version" of Said Nursi's teachings "to the children of the privileged class", avoiding a high pressure or traditional, old fashioned approach. Like Said Nursi, (who advocated the combining "traditional Islamic beliefs with scientific ideas" and eventually became "one of the leading figures" of the Islamic revival in Turkey), Oktar argued against Marxism, communism and materialistic philosophy, but Oktar attached special importance to refuting evolution and Darwinism because he felt that it had been turned into an ideology used to promote materialism and atheism and similar unreligious ideologies. In a cultural analysis of psychosis and politics in Turkey, Canadian psychological anthropologist Sadeq Rahimi observes, "while Said Nursi set his 'enemy' to be the 'irreligion' of communism, Yahya has singled out the 'materialism of Darwinism' and the evolutionary theory as the antichrist, a strategic adaptation that led to both a serious internal inconsistency and an intricate network of conspiracy theories." He personally funded a pamphlet entitled the Theory of Evolution, which combined "mysticism with scientific rhetoric", pseudoscientific arguments against evolution. In 1986 he enrolled in the Philosophy Department of Istanbul University. Oktar appeared as the cover story of Nokta magazine, reporting how he gathered with his friends and held lectures in a mosque. Many university students, mostly from Boğaziçi University, one of the most prestigious universities