Whoever resorts to Google in order to find out something about me will find my name paired very often as author with Harun Yahya. This is not true. In my professional capacity as an editor long prior to his subsequent fame and, some might say, notoriety, I edited the texts of a number of his books, but have never acted as his co-author. It is a classic example of the jumbled nature of digital data on the Internet.
UPDATE
Since 2008, when it was necessary to write the above, the rapid ascent of Harun Yahya to notoriety or rather descent into criminality, obscenity and surreal absurdity can hardly have escaped notice. Now that he has been convicted in a court of law, it is possible to comment without prejudicing his case, but whether it is worth doing so is a moot point. I had long since ceased to edit his books.
We might say that it was a story of cyber feedback that started with the organisation’s tapping into the huge reservoir of readers waiting for a Muslim author to tackle scientific subjects, particularly Darwinian evolution. It did not seem to matter that the books were manufactured rather than written, importing wholesale and uncritically the ideas of Christian Creationists among others. Those writings generated a great deal of attention, drew in a lot of people, and, fairly obviously, substantial sums of money. And all of that led to something that no one foresaw or could even have imagined.
Much as the crimes Harun Yahya has been convicted of are reprehensible, worse than them is that he committed them blazoning them across the media as if not only was he not ashamed of them, but rather proud of them, and that he regarded them as somehow part of his Deen. That is a more serious issue than his behaviour, appalling as it was.