By KENNETH CHANG


AMHERST, Massachusetts - Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said in October 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-yearold 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. The degree of acceptance of evolution varies.

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.

In a survey of 2,527 Pakistani high school students conducted by the McGill researchers and their international collaborators, 86 percent agreed with this statement: “Millions of fossils show that life has existed for billions of years and changed over time.”

One of the conference participants, Taner Edis, said he never encountered creationist undertones when he was growing up in Turkey in the 1970s.

Some years later, while browsing a bookstore on a visit to Turkey, Dr. Edis a professor of physics at Truman State University in Missouri, found books about creationism filed in the science section. “It actually caught me by surprise,” he said.

Turkey is officially a secular government but is now ruled by an Islamic party. The teaching of evolution has largely disappeared, at least below the university level, and the science curriculum in public schools is written in deference to religious beliefs, Dr. Edis said.

Harun Yahya, a Turkish creationist of the old-Earth variety, has gained prominence in Turkey and elsewhere. On the other side of Asia, most of the biology teachers in Indonesia use Mr. Yahya’s creationist books in their classrooms, the McGill researchers found, although some said they did that to provide counterarguments to materials their students were reading anyway.

For many Muslims, even evolution and the notion that life flourished without the intervening hand of Allah is largely compatible with their religion. What many find unacceptable is human evolution, the idea that humans evolved from primitive primates.

Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a prominent atomic physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan, said that when he gave lectures covering the sweep of cosmological history from the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth, the audience listened without objection to most of it. “Everything is O.K. until the apes stand up,” Dr. Hoodbhoy said.

Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escorted out.


DAVID JONATHAN ROSS / Darwin’s finches on the Islamic symbol in art work used at a scientific conference about Muslim views of evolution.