Although Harun Yahya is often understood as a pseudonym for Adnan Oktar (pictured above), it is also commonly used for the group that produces a large volume of videos and web sites on topics related to his books, most notably Miracles of the Quran and Atlas of Creation.  Using the search function in the upper right of the Portal screen will give you all the Harun Yahya materials on the Portal.

The organization’s main web site is  www.harunyahya.com. (And also .org and .net)  There is also a Turkish-only site with materials:  http://harunyahya.tv/.  Harun Yahya’s materials are also found on A9 TV.

One might note that these sites are not well visited.  The harunyahya.com site is ranked 211,805 overall (where small numbers are better) (Alexa.com, accessed 6 May 2015), and is currently more popular in Indonesia (rank 19,717) and Pakistan (rank 20,160) than in Turkey (rank 26,433), although in terms of percentage of visitors, Indonesia is first with 13.2%, Turkey second with 11.1% and the United States is third with 10.6%.  However, visitors are spending an average of only 2.38 minutes on the site per day.  The Turkish site, harunyahya.tv, which receives nearly 77% of its viewers from Turkey, is ranked still lower, at 71,753 in Turkey, and visitors spend a mere 1.62 minutes on the site.  The Harun Yahya group also appears to control several key URLs, such a “miraclesofthequran.com” that are not among the sites Alexa names as being owned by the same organization.

Harun Yahya videos generally are of three distinct types.  The first type, from which the image above is taken, is a discussion on a topic with Adnan Oktar himself.  These videos often have small “audiences” of garishly made up and clothed women included in the video.  (One should note that they are in no way typical of Turkish women.)  These women are rarely named.  The second type, generally older, have a speaker, often Oktar Babuna or an unnamed woman, talking about a specific topic.  These videos, usually 6 minutes or less, are often polemical, calling scientific work “fake”, for instance.  The third type is the most common, consisting of videos that seem more like standard documentaries with a voice over moving images; the length ranges from over an hour to around a minute.  These are frequently clipped and re-released.  They generally promote the ideas found in the Adnan Oktar’s books, and may be readily identified by the background music and frequent re-use of images across the videos, even when the “HY” watermark is not present.

The distribution of Harun Yahya videos is exceptionally wide.  All the major video platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Tune.pk) have multiple copies of clips from the longer documentaries, apparently uploaded with the permission of the group.  Newer variants are more likely to have the HY notation in the upper right corner and be produced in higher resolutions.

Select Bibliography:

Bigliardi, S. (2014). “Who’s Afraid of Theoscientography?  An Interpretive Hypothesis on Harun Yahya.” Zygon:  Journal of Religion and Science 49(1): 66-80.

Solberg, A. R. (2013). The Mahdi Wears Armani:  An Analysis of the Harun Yahya Enterprise. Stockholm, Södertörns högskola.