L

ate on a Tuesday night in 2018 I was sitting

in a TV studio in Istanbul looking up at

an empty stage, waiting for Turkey’s most

bizarre — and most powerful — cult leader

to arrive. Around me in the audience were

at least a dozen perky young men in suits.

They were followers of Adnan Oktar,

a Muslim preacher who had grown in fame

through his TV channel, on which his female

followers — known as “kittens” — would

dance for him in minidresses after he had lectured

them on Islamic theology.

I had asked to interview him that morning in

response to serious allegations made by a defector

from the cult, who claimed that behind the gaudy

façade was a horrifying den of abuse and criminal

activity. The cult had denied everything.

To my surprise one of the kittens replied to my

interview request straight away, telling me to come

to the studio at the cult’s headquarters at midnight.

Two hours later I was getting bored. But the men in

the audience looked as though there was nowhere

they’d rather be. They were polite, engaging and

good looking, but with a strange blank intensity:

all things that I would in time recognise as hallmarks

of Oktar’s followers.

Then Oktar stepped out on to the stage. He was in

his sixties, with his beard and hair dyed blue-black and

the face of a matinee idol gone to seed. A huge hernia

stuck out from his stomach and visibly hung down

his leg, making him limp in his double-breasted suit.

The TV cameras were off but you wouldn’t know it

from the host’s performance.

Over the next half-hour he ranted at me about

conspiracy theories, including his belief that a

murderous cabal he called the British Deep State

was trying to control the world. I asked him about

accusations that he had abused and exploited his

followers. He said they were all just “friends” who felt

a “deep love” for each other. It all made such little

sense that my editors didn’t run the story.

Three months later Oktar and more than 200 of his

followers were arrested on charges ranging from child

abuse to kidnapping and torture. Dragos, the hilltop

compound in Istanbul where I’d interviewed him,

was raided by police. Some of the women who had

lived there claimed it had been like a prison.

In January 2021 Oktar was sentenced to 1,075 years

and three months in jail. The strange televangelist

with the scantily clad followers (as most people in

Turkey knew him) was, according to the Turkish

justice system, one of the most serious criminals

in the country’s history.

I decided to investigate what had been going on

inside this cult, and ended up turning it into a podcast

series for Stories of our times. What I found was more

shocking than anything I had imagined — and led

to me being forced to leave my home in Turkey for

months after threats related to my reporting.

Before he became a cult leader, Oktar was a

small-time preacher from Ankara, Turkey’s capital.

Born in 1956, he moved to Istanbul in his early

twenties with his mother after what some of his

former followers have said was a troubled childhood

at the hands of an abusive father. He began gathering

followers, holding meetings in his small house near

the Bosphorus. From the beginning he looked for a

particular type of person: the sons and daughters of

prominent families, highly educated, multilingual,

well-connected, wealthy and beautiful.

Among them was Seda Isildar, then 15 years old and

at secondary school in Istanbul. She was introduced

to Oktar and his group through school friends in the

mid-1980s, though she had first seen him on the cover

of the respected news magazine Nokta, which

reported on the privately educated students drawn

to his new religious community.

Oktar’s group didn’t have a name and its members

didn’t see themselves as a cult — more as a circle of

like-minded people.

“They tell you you’re special. You are different

Adnan Oktar is

led away by police

officers after a raid

on his compound in

Istanbul, 2018

LOUISE

CALLAGHAN

SEDA ISILDAR WAS A SCHOOLGIRL WHEN OKTAR

COERCED HER INTO MARRIAGE. LATER HE FORCED HER

TO HAVE A NOSE JOB WITHOUT GENERAL ANAESTHETIC

GETTY IMAGES

The Sunday Times Magazine • 21