Month: November 2009

“Protracted People’s War (PPW) is a military strategy to be adopted in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial context, and, in the different context of imperialism, could be applied in a modified form even in imperialist countries. But basically the theory of PPW as developed by Mao was to be applied in semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries. That’s why the military line adopted in the case of Nepal was basically a line of Protracted People’s War, which we developed through the course of our struggle, applying it very creatively in Nepal for ten years.”

baburam_bhattarai

WPRM: Thank you for meeting with us today. In your article in The Worker #4 ‘The Political Economy of the People’s War’ you write that “the transformation of one social system into another, or the destruction of the old by the new, always involves force and a revolutionary leap. The People’s War is such a means of eliminating the old by a new force and of taking a leap towards a new and higher social system.” Why then did the Maoist party enter the peace process and attempt to change society through Constituent Assembly elections?

Baburam Bhattarai: This is a very important question related to the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). The basic motive force of history is the contradiction between the existing level of productive forces and the production relations within society. At a certain stage this contradiction sharpens and there is a break with the old relationship and a leap to the new one. We call this social revolution. That leap necessarily confronts a certain force, because every set of productive relations is backed by a state, and the state means basically the organised force of the army. To break with the old mode of production and leap into a new one, you have to break all the relations within the state backed by the army. And that inevitably requires the use of force. This is a law of history and a basic principle of MLM which nobody can revise. If you revise or abandon it then you are no longer a Marxist. There is no question of our party ever ending this basic principle.

By adhering to this basic principle we waged armed Protracted People’s War (PPW) from 1996 to 2006. But after 2006 we made a certain departure in our tactical line. Some people are confused about this and think we have abandoned PPW forever and adopted a peaceful path of social development. This confusion needs to be cleared. What we are saying is that People’s War is a multifaceted war where both the armed and political form of struggle needs to be combined.

WPRM

By E. Benjamin Skinner

A former slave, Chandar Sabahi. “We were treated like animals,” she says. “Anyone who refused to work was beaten up.”
Zia Mazhar / Free the Slaves

As Hillary Clinton pays her first visit to Pakistan as Secretary of State, an unfolding hostage crisis will test the Obama Administration’s rhetoric on human rights in the region. Officials at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad say at least three landlords have held as many as 170 bonded farmworkers at gunpoint on their estates in the country’s southeast Sindh province since late September. With U.S. attention focused on getting Pakistan to deal with huge security issues to Washington’s satisfaction, will Clinton be able to press Islamabad’s rulers to address a controversy involving rural poverty and modern-day slavery?

The crisis began after the workers’ advocates successfully petitioned three district courts to declare as illegal the debts that the landlords were using to compel the workers into indentured servitude. Those debts average around 1,000 Pakistani rupees — roughly $12. The hostages, a third of whom are children, some as young as 4 months old, are landless peasants, known as haari in Urdu. According to Ghulam Hyder, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Green Rural Development Organization, the landlords have killed one hostage already and are threatening to kill the others unless they drop the cases and return to work. The landlords also abducted Amarchand Bheel, an advocate for the laborers, as he traveled to court to plead their cause.
(Submitted by Abdul Hamid Bashani Khan)

Time

By Dr. Sarojini Sahoo

‘Manuvad’ has become a hot topic in Indian politics today. The orthodox RSS and its feeding political party like BJP are more likely advocating for the ‘ism,’ whereas the ‘dalit political parties’ like BSP have raised their voices against that inhuman religious code. Manuvad, based on “Manu Samhita” or “Manu Smriti” as the ‘social code,’ presents itself as a discourse given by the sage Manu to a group of seers, or rishis, who beseeched him to tell them the “law of all the social classes (1.2).” Manu became the standard point of reference for all future Dharma??stras that followed it.

However, there are still some fallacies in the Hindu mind regarding Manu Smriti or Manu Samhita.

Fallacies and Facts:

Fallacy: Manu Samhita is a part of Vedic Scriptures.

Fact: The Vedic period stretched from the second and first millennia BCE continuing up to the sixth century BCE based on literary evidence. Mahavira and Buddha arrived in around sixth century BCE and they both counterattacked Vedic concepts on social and spiritual grounds. These two preachers never claimed themselves as God and they are also considered as the path finders of Hinduism. Buddhism became a separate religion when it came to China. The dominance of Buddha and Mahavira over Hinduism continued up to Maurya Empire (from ca. 320 BCE). And this period also was treated as the golden age, the classical age of Sanskrit literature, and the Middle kingdoms of India. After the breakdown of the Maurya and Shunga empires, there was a period of uncertainty that led to renewed interest in traditional social norms and the Brahmanical religion, which suffered during Buddhist and Jainist rule, tried to revive it again. Manu Smriti or Manu Samhita was written at that time and critics find contradictions in concept, especially when the scriptures try to state the position of women in society.

Certain verses of Manu Samhita (e.g. III – 55, 56, 57, 59, 62) glorify the position of women, while other verses (e.g. IX – 3, 17) seem to attack the position and freedom women have. Certain interpretations of verses IX – 18 claim that it discourages women from reading Vedic scriptures. But verse II – 240, however, allows women to read Vedic scriptures. Similar contradictory phrases are encountered in relation to child marriage in verses IX – 94 and IX – 90.

It is also doubtful that the scriptures were written by a single person but were probably written by many. Some scriptures in that Samhita are so contradictory that the founder of Arya Samaj, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, a noteworthy nineteenth century campaigner for women’s rights, cites Manu’s laws hundreds of times in his writings. In his opinion, verses highly critical of women and the lower classes (sudras) are not Vedic at all but interpolations introduced later by the corrupted Brahminical class. Another scholar, Dr. Surendra Kumar, claims that out of a total of 2,685 verses in the current Manusmriti, only 1,214 are authentic or can be confirmed by the Vedas; the other 1,471 are purported to be interpolations.

Fallacy: It is believed that the text is the earliest and foremost and only Law created by Manu, whose status is like Moses in Greco-Semitic religions.

Fact: Manu’s time period is 200 B.C.E to 200 A.C.E , while Moses died in about Feb-Mar 1271 BCE ( Access: Death of Moses at http://jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=830&letter=M&search=moses#2846 } The Greco-Semitic religion started with Moses, but Manu is much more younger to the History of Hinduism. Secondly, Manu Samhita is not the only source of Hindu laws as it is claimed. There is also Laws of Y?jñavalkya in the Hindu religion. Besides these two authors, ?pastamba, Gautama, Baudh?yana, and Vasistha are some writers who authored in Dharmashashtra, a primarily Hindu text which refers to religious and legal duty.

Fallacy: The text claims that Bhrigu was a student of Manu, to whom he (Manu) taught these lessons.

Fact: Actually Bhrigu was a saint of the Vedic period in around 3000 B.C.E (See: “Bhrigu-Samhita: An ancient manuscript with medical matters of interest” by Ashok D. B. Vaidya published in CURRENT SCIENCE , VOL. 81, NO. 7, 10 OCTOBER 2001. This article may be viewed at http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/oct102001/735.pdf ). Hence it is mere or virtual imagination or a deliberately wrong quoted misrepresentation that Manu taught his Samhita to Bhrigu.

Fallacy: The British colonial rulers and contemporary conservative Hindu radicals claim that Manu Samhita is followed universally by Hindus and is a common code for Hindu religion.

Fact: Manu Samhita was never followed by Hindus unanimously. In earlier days, the Vaishnavaites, the Shaivas and the Smartas never followed this text. In modern times, modern liberals, Hindu reformists, Dalit advocates, feminists, Marxists are the firebrand critics of this Samhita. It is only the British ruler, who paid importance to Manu Samhita to prepare codes of law for the natives. In 1794, Sir William Jones published the English translation of the Samhita to help the British ruler and it was propagated as the only Hindu code by the British administration.

What Manu Samhita Advised:

Laws of Manu has 2,694 stanzas in 12 chapters. The inhuman code of Manu divides Hindus into four varnas: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra. According to Manu, the supreme creator Brahma, gave birth to the Brahmins from his mouth; the Kshatriyas from his shoulders; the Vaishyas from his thighs; and Shudras from his feet (Manu’s code I-31.)

Let the first part of a Brahman’s name denote something auspicious; a Kshatriya’s be connected with power; and a Vaishya’s with wealth; but a Shudra’s express something contemptible (Manu II. 31.)

Let the second part of a Brahmin’s name be a word implying happiness; of a Kshatriya’s, a word implying protection; a Vaishya’s, a term expressive of thriving; a Shudra’s, an expression denoting service (Manu II. 32).

A Shudra is unfit of receive education. The upper varnas should not impart education or give advice to a Shudra. It is not necessary that the Shudra should know the laws and codes and hence need not be taught. Violators will go to as amrita hell (Manu IV-78 to 81). One must never read the Vedas in the presence of the Shudras (Manu IV. 99). He who instructs Shudra pupils and he whose teacher is a Shudra shall become disqualified from being invited to a shradha (Manu III. 156).

A Brahmin who is only a Brahmin by decent, i.e., one who has neither studied nor performed any other act required by the Vedas may, at the king’s pleasure, interpret the law to him i.e., act as the judge, but never a Shudra, however learned he may be (Manu VIII. 20). Any Brahmin, who enslaves or tries to enslave a Brahmin, is liable for a penalty of no less than 600 PANAS. A Brahmin can order a Shudra to serve him without any remuneration because the Shudra is created by Brahma to serve the Brahmins. Even if a Brahmin frees a Shudra from slavery, the Shudra continues to be a slave as he is created for slavery. Nobody has the right to free him (Manu VIII-50,56 and 59). A Shudra who insults a twice- born man ( i.e. a Brahmin) with gross invectives shall have his tongue cut out for he is of low origin (Manu VIII. 270). If he mentions the names and castes of the (twice-born) wit contumely, an iron nail, ten fingers long, shall be thrust red hot into his mouth (Manu VIII. 271). If a Shudra arrogantly presumes to preach religion to Brahmins, the king shall order burning oil to be poured in his (Shudra’s) mouth and ears ( Manu VIII. 272). No Shudra should have property of his own; he should have nothing of his own. The existence of a wealthy Shudra is bad for the Brahmins. A Brahman may take possession of the goods of a Shudra (ManuVIII-417 & X129). No superfluous collection of wealth must be made by a Shudra, even though he has power to make it, since a servile man, who has amassed riches, becomes proud, and, by his insolence or neglect, gives pain to Brahmins (Manu X. 129).

Manu’s attitude was not only wild and inhuman for the Shudras. He possessed more furious ideas about women. His code describes:

“In childhood, a female must be subject to her father; in youth to her husband; then to her sons. A woman must never be independent. There is no God on earth for a woman than her husband…..She must on the death of her husband allow herself to be burnt alive on the same funeral pyre, that everyone will praise her virtue.”

According to Manu, “all women are liars, corrupt, greedy, and unvirtuous (Manu II 1). It is the nature of women to seduce men in this (world); the wise are never unguarded in the company of males (Manu II. 213). Killing of a woman, a Shudra, or an atheist is not sinful. Women are an embodiment of the worst desires, hatred, deceit, jealousy and bad character. Women should never be given freedom (Manu IX. 17 and V. 47, 147). One should not sit in a lonely place with one’s mother, sister, or daughter, for the senses are powerful and master even a learned man” (Manu II. 215). A Brahmin male by virtue of his birth becomes the first husband of all women in the universe (Manu III. 14). Though destitute or virtuous, or seeking pleasure elsewhere, or devoid of good qualities, yet a husband must be constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife (Manu V. 154). At her pleasure, let her (i.e. widow) enunciate her body by living voluntarily on pure flowers, roots, and fruits, but let her not when her lord is deceased, even pronounce the name of another man (Manu V. 157). A woman must always maintain her virtue and surrender her body to her husband only, even if she is married off to an ugly person or even a leper (Manu IX. 14). Women have no right to study the Vedas. That is why their Sanskars are performed without Veda Mantras. Women have no knowledge of religion because they have no right to know the Vedas. [?] The uttering of Veda Mantras, they are as unclean as untruth is” (Manu IX. 18). None of the acts of women can be taken as good and reasonable (Manu X.4). A woman shall not perform the daily sacrifices prescribed by the Vedas. If she does it, she will go to hell (Manu XI. 36/37).

Manu Samhita’s Utility in Recent Days

Actually Manu Samhita lost its significance in a later period. The code was not accepted by Hindus, and Shaivas, Smartas and Vaishnavaites created their own codes of law. During colonial rule, Robert Clive and Lord Macaulay, gave another incarnation of Manu, finding this code as a useful tool to divide and rule over the Hindus. They argued that the caste system, as prescribed by the Manu Samhita, developed a de-facto apartheid social system that was very easy to subjugate and rule.

Hinduism is a different and a broad ‘platform’ for all, which the colonial rulers could not understand. It is different from other religions. Buddhism, Jainism and Skhism are also considered as a part of Hinduism. It is the political scenario, which barred Christianity or Islam to emerge with Hinduism. Otherwise, these religions might be considered as a part of Hinduism. The “Dharma” of Hinduism or “Dhamma” of Buddhism is different from the term ‘religion.’ It may be a fact of history that the politics of a ruler is always to try to hide this truth from the people and to try to misguide them. But, it is 100 percent true that this was not the original intention of the rishis and sages who actually produced the scriptures. In fact, there is constant reference in the Vedas to ‘BAHUJANA HITAY’ meaning the welfare of all people. Only in the medieval centuries, there was a lot of perversion, and the so-called lower castes were oppressed and feminine freedom was denied.

Never has Manu Samhita been found acceptable in the Hindu mind. Even the modern Hindu mind practically does not want to follow this rule. It is also very notorious to say that all upper-caste Hindus are Manuvaadi, as some dalit leaders often used to say in their public statements. They are the political parties who try to cash-in votes using the Manu Samhita as their currency. And perhaps this is where the Indian people are at the highest risk.

Readers can read the English translation of Manu Samhita from http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/manu.htm

Dr. Sahoo’s website is http://www.sarojinisahoo.blogspot.com/

She can be reached at sarojinisahoo2003@yahoo.co.in

By Jacqueline Rose

Murder in the Name of Honour by Rana Husseini
Oneworld, 250 pp, £12.99, May 2009, ISBN 978 1 85168 524 0

In Honour of Fadime: Murder and Shame by Unni Wikan, translated by Anna Paterson
Chicago, 305 pp, £12.50, June 2008, ISBN 978 0 226 89686 1

Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed by Ayse Onal
Saqi, 256 pp, £12.99, May 2008, ISBN 978 0 86356 617 2

The term ‘honour killing’ entered the British legal system in 2003, when Abdullah Yones pleaded guilty to killing his 16-year-old daughter Heshu. Accounts of the case vary but certain facts are clear. The family had fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 – in London the father worked as a volunteer for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. At the William Morris Academy in Hammersmith, where she was a pupil, Heshu repeatedly expressed her fear of a forced marriage, but teachers ignored her. When her parents discovered her relationship with a Christian Lebanese boy, she ran away from home – her teachers, concerned that he was having an adverse effect on her schoolwork, had told her family about him. Taken to Kurdistan to marry her cousin (one account says Pakistan), and forced to undergo a virginity test, Heshu was threatened with a gun by her father but saved, on this occasion, by her mother and brother. After the family’s return to England, her brother discovered letters in which she repeated her desire to escape. She was locked in her room and stabbed to death by her father, who then tried to kill himself by jumping from the balcony after slitting his own throat.

According to Rana Husseini in Murder in the Name of Honour, in interviews before the trial, Abdullah first denied having anything to do with his daughter’s murder, then claimed she had committed suicide and that he had tried to kill himself out of grief. His £125,000 bail was raised by the local community. Threats were made against those planning to give evidence against him. In court, Abdullah pleaded guilty and asked for the death sentence, but was given life. Unni Wikan, too, tells this story, in her case-study of Fadime Sahindal, a Swedish-Kurdish woman killed at the age of 25 by her father in 2002. ‘Heshu’s case shows the terrible price the community exacts of a man who feels bound to kill his daughter,’ she writes. Wikan is an anthropologist who has made it her brief to extend the boundaries of cross-cultural understanding. ‘There have been times when I faltered,’ she writes in the opening pages, ‘because I came to feel too much sympathy for people I didn’t want to sympathise with.’

If Heshu Yones’s case makes history as the first legally recognised ‘honour killing’ in Britain, it is also remarkable for the testimony left by Heshu herself. ‘Hey, for an older man you have a good strong punch and kick,’ she writes in a farewell note to her father before trying to leave home. ‘I hope you enjoyed testing your strength on me; it was fun being on the receiving end. Well done.’ The fact that Abdullah had often beaten his daughter was somehow never picked up at her school. But Heshu’s tone is also resigned, self-blaming and philosophical, the voice, we might be tempted to say, of a ‘modern’ child: ‘It is evident that I shouldn’t be a part of you. I take all the blame openly – I’m not the child you wanted or expected me to be. disappointments are born of expectations. Maybe you expected a different me and I expected a different you.’ The letter could – almost – be a letter from any teenage daughter to her father: ‘life, being how it is, isn’t necessarily how it is. it is just simply how you choose to see it.’ But if her father had been able to agree on this principle, which gives equal validity to different ways of seeing the world, he would not have had – or rather would not have felt that he had – to kill her.

It is significant that this story begins when Abdullah receives an anonymous letter at his place of work accusing his daughter of behaving like a prostitute. The slur against a daughter’s, mother’s, sister’s honour most frequently begins with rumour and gossip, words that home in unfailingly on their target, but which also seem to come from nowhere.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/jacqueline-rose/a-piece-of-white-silk

(Submitted by reader)

Jacqueline Rose (born in 1949 in London) is a British academic who is currently Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London. Born into a non-practicing Jewish family, Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda’s College, Oxford and gained her higher degree (Mâitrise) from the Sorbonne and her doctorate from the University of London. Rose is critical of Zionism, describing it as “[having] been traumatic for the Jews as well as the Palestinians.”[1] In 2005, writing for the online political magazine Open Democracy, she called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

London Review of Books

(IRIN) – Have you checked in with your breastfeeding support group? If you were a woman who gave birth in one of Mali’s 48 “baby-friendly hospitals”, you should have been assigned to one that checked up on you – often as soon as minutes after the delivery.

In San village, 380km north of the capital Bamako, dozens of mothers in 2005 formed the “Good Mothers” group – known in the local language as Denbanyuma –to tell new mothers about the all-milk rule; 660 mothers across the country are trained to do the same as part of a government child survival programme adopted in 2007, according to the Health Ministry.

“Before, women fed their newborns tea and water without knowing the consequences of this practice,” San mothers’ group leader Aïssa Tangara Traoré told IRIN. The UN has estimated that 300,000 babies could be saved every year in West Africa if they were fed only mother’s milk for the first six months rather than formula, tea, water or food as is generally the case.

Exclusive breastfeeding has been proven to boost a newborn’s defences against malnutrition and infections, yet according to the UN only 20 percent of mothers in West Africa and Central Africa report practicing it. Mali’s Sahelian neighbours have among the lowest numbers: 6 percent in Burkina Faso, 4 percent in Niger.

In a 2006 Mali government survey, 38 percent of women said they breastfed exclusively. The Health Ministry is conducting a new nutrition survey to be completed in 2010.

To date 48 maternity centres in Mali have been accredited – and 26 are in the review process – as baby-friendly hospitals, which is a UNICEF initiative launched in 1991 to encourage breastfeeding. One of the requirements for accreditation is to form breastfeeding support groups.

“As soon as the baby is washed, we ask the mother to start breastfeeding,” San mothers’ group member Oumou Dembélé, 35 and mother of four, told IRIN. “We visit the mothers every day until they leave the maternity ward.” She added that one Sunday of each month, the Good Mothers group organizes a talk at the San health centre to help convince mothers. “We still have the grandmothers who demand their daughters give babies tea or water,” said Dembélé.

Change

Still perspiring from childbirth at the commune five health centre in Bamako, Diaminatou Cissé rested under her mosquito net with her newborn at her chest. She told IRIN the baby girl would not be fed the same things her older brother was. “My grandmother gave him cow’s milk and tap water. She is no longer alive, but my mother shares her views.” She said she has learned from the centre’s mother mentors that there is already water in milk.

The centre’s midwife, Djeneba Samaké, told IRIN that at baptisms a mothers’ support group talks about breastfeeding. She said economics helps promote breastfeeding: mother’s milk is free. “But even the richest women here who consider powdered milk as a status symbol and sign of progress are now choosing to breastfeed exclusively.”

IRIN NEWS

via IAOJ

By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE – As part of an organized campaign, young Muslim men are deliberately luring women from different faiths into marriage so they will convert to Islam, say radical Indian Hindu and Christian groups in south India.

The alleged plot has been dubbed “love jihad”. It first surfaced in September, when two Muslim men from Pathanamthitta town in the southwestern state of Kerala reportedly enticed two women – a Hindu and a Christian – into marriage and forced them to convert to Islam.

The women first claimed to have became Muslims voluntarily, but after being allowed back to their parents’ houses said they had been abducted and coerced to convert. The men were reportedly members of Campus Front, a student wing of radical Muslim group the Popular Front of India (PFI).

The Pathanamthitta incident was followed by an avalanche of media reports on “love jihad”. Some described it as a movement, others claimed that forced conversions through marriage were actually being run by an organization called Love Jihad, or Romeo Jihad.

Hindu and Christian groups have weighed in with their own “facts” on the “love jihad”.

The Sri Ram Sene, a fundamentalist Hindu group, now claims thousands of girls were forcibly converted to Islam in the past few years after marrying Muslim men. It says that after conversion the women were “trained in anti-national activities”. India’s main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has said “love jihadis” have receiving foreign aid – from the Middle East – for the campaign.

Asia Times

By Mukul Dube

State governments and High Courts have taken action, and are
contemplating further action, against what is described as “alleged Love Jihad”.

Possibly to act against what is only alleged but not proven is to err on the side of wisdom.

However, do we have any assurance that, if this whole “Love Jihad” thing should turn out to be an engineered fraud, punishment will be meted out to those who manufactured it and to those who will have wasted the resources of the Indian State in fighting it?

Will there be an official repudiation of statements which have been made about the “national ramifications” of what is not so far proven not to be a load of bull? What will be done to those judges who ordered adult women to stay with their parents, an action which must be called unauthorised house arrest and the taking away of fundamental rights?

By Kenneth Chang

“ORIGINS Darwin’s finches on the Islamic symbol in art work used at a conference in Massachusetts about the acceptance of evolution among Muslims.”

AMHERST, Mass. — Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said last month as they gathered here to discuss the topic.

But, they said, young-Earth creationists, who believe God created the universe, Earth and life just a few thousand years ago, are rare, if not nonexistent.

One reason is that although the Koran, the holy text of Islam, says the universe was created in six days, the next line adds that a day, in this instance, is metaphorical: “a thousand years of your reckoning.”

By contrast, some Christian creationists find in the Bible a strict chronology that requires a 6,000-year-old Earth and thus object not only to evolution but also to much of modern geology and cosmology, which say the Earth and the universe are billions of years old.

“Views of scientific evolution are clearly influenced by underlying religious beliefs,” said Salman Hameed, who convened the two-day conference here at Hampshire College, where he is a professor of integrated science and humanities. “There is no young-Earth creationism.”

But that does not mean that all of evolution fits Islam or that all Muslims happily accept the findings of modern biology. More and more seem to be joining the ranks of the so-called old-Earth creationists. They do not quarrel with astronomers and geologists, just biologists, insisting that life is the creation of God, not the happenstance consequence of random occurrences.

The debate over evolution is only now gaining prominence in many Islamic countries as education improves and more students are exposed to the ideas of modern biology.

The degree of acceptance of evolution varies among Islamic countries.

Research led by the Evolution Education Research Center at McGill University, in Montreal, found that high school biology textbooks in Pakistan covered the theory of evolution. Quotations from the Koran at the beginning of the chapters are chosen to suggest that the religion and the theory coexist harmoniously.

In a survey of 2,527 Pakistani high school students conducted by the McGill researchers and their international collaborators, 28 percent of the students agreed with the creationist sentiment, “Evolution is not a well-accepted scientific fact.” More than 60 percent disagreed, and the rest were not sure.

Eighty-six percent agreed with this statement: “Millions of fossils show that life has existed for billions of years and changed over time.”

The situation in Turkey is different and changed only in the past couple of decades. One of the conference participants, Taner Edis, said he never encountered creationist undertones when he was growing up in Turkey in the 1970s. “I first noticed creationism when I came to America for graduate school,” said Dr. Edis, now a professor of physics at Truman State University in Missouri. He thought it an American oddity.

New York Times