Fethullah Gülen Voted World's Top Living Public Intellectual
Turkish intellectual Fethullah Gülen, one of the world's most influential Islamic scholars, has come out on top of a list of "The World's Top 20 Public Intellectuals" organized by the magazines Foreign Policy and Prospect.
The top 10 names on the list, closely observed by millions all over the world, were all Muslim scholars, including two Nobel laureates: Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi.
Also on the top 20 list were activist Noam Chomsky, best known for his scathing criticism of US foreign policy extending back to the Vietnam War; Former Vice President Al Gore, who championed the campaign against global warming; historian Bernard Lewis, one of the foremost historians of the Middle East; Umberto Eco, a famous Italian novelist; Amartya Sen, the premier welfare economist of the 20th century; Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International; and Gary Kasparov, the chess grandmaster and a democracy activist from Russia.
In its May/June issue the Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine published a list of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" in the world and asked its readers to cast their ballots for the top 20, which it promised to publish in the next issue. The magazine said they did not expect "an avalanche of voters," but that half a million people visited the foreignpolicy.com site to pick their favorite candidate. The magazine added: "Such an outpouring reveals something unique about the power of the men and women we chose to rank. They were included on our initial list of 100 in large part because of the influence of their ideas."
Published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the bimonthly is one of America's leading magazines for researching and analyzing international affairs and making recommendations for US foreign policy.
Foreign Policy explained how it had chosen the top 100 out of so many more candidates: "Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country." The magazine asked readers to select the top 20 from among the 100 mentioned. It also allowed readers to offer a write-in candidate. Stephen Colbert, a TV host and satirist, became the top write-in candidate. Colbert is a host of the popular late-night fake news show The Colbert Report. Colbert has become one of young America's go-to sources for news analysis.
Foreign Policy noted that Gülen had gathered the most votes after Turkey's largest-circulating newspaper, Zaman, picked up the story and carried it on its front page. Foreign Policy wrote: "Part of being a public intellectual is also having a talent for communicating with a wide and diverse public. This skill is certainly an asset for some who find themselves in the list's top ranks." Foreign Policy indicated that press coverage profiling these intellectuals appeared around the world, with stories running in Canada, India, Indonesia, Qatar, Spain and elsewhere. Some names on the list, such as Aitzaz Ahsan, Noam Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff and Amr Khaled, mounted voting drives by promoting the list on their Web sites.
Foreign Policy introduced Fethullah Gülen to its readers as an Islamic scholar with a global network of millions of followers who is both revered and reviled in his native Turkey. "To members of the Gülen movement, he is an inspirational leader who encourages a life guided by moderate Islamic principles. To his detractors, he represents a threat to Turkey's secular order," ForeignPolicy.com said. A news item that appeared in yesterday's edition of the Guardian daily completed this introduction by saying, "He was cleared of trying to topple the state in 2006 after being charged over footage in which he apparently urged civil service supporters to await his orders to overthrow the system. He said the film had been doctored." The Guardian piece said that Gülen is "credited with establishing a global network of schools that preach Islam in a spirit of tolerance and has been praised in the West for promoting dialogue."
Foreign Policy included descriptions of other figures who made the top 10. For Pamuk, it wrote that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 after a year in which he faced criminal charges in Turkey for his controversial remarks on the Ottoman-era killings of Armenians. It added, "His most famous books are My Name Is Red, Snow, and Istanbul: Memories and the City."
Foreign Policy also said Gülen has kept a relatively low profile since settling in the United States in 1999, having fled Turkey after being accused of undermining secularism, but did not mention that seven out of the 10 Muslim intellectuals topping the list are living in the West and that all have had problems with the established authoritarian regimes in their countries. Two other names also had conflicts with their native countries' established regimes: Aitzat Ahsan has been a target of violence during Pervez Musharraf's rule in Pakistan, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi lives in Qatar because he is not welcome in his native country, Egypt. The magazine, however, noted that the ideas of the top ten, particularly concerning Islam, differ significantly.
Foreign Policy credited Fethullah Gülen's supporters for the result of the poll, saying: "Within hours, votes in his favor began to pour in. His supporters -- typically educated, upwardly mobile Muslims -- were eager to cast ballots not only for their champion but for other Muslims in the Top 100." Surprised by Gülen's name coming first in the poll, Prospect Editor David Goodhart admitted that he had not heard of Gülen previously. Speaking to the Guardian, Goodhart said, "The victory of Gülen draws attention to the most important conflict in Europe, played out in Turkey between the secular nationalist establishment and the reforming Islamic democrats of the AK [Justice and Development] Party." Foreign Policy added to this comment by saying that identity politics carried the day during the polls.
But the supporters of Fethullah Gülen were not surprised at all. Harun Tokak, the president of the Writers and Journalists' Foundation (GYV), of which Gülen is the honorary president, told Today's Zaman that Gülen deserved this fame and more. "For us, the fact that the editors of these two magazines placed Gülen among the Top 100 was valuable. The people already knew Gülen. That his name was on the list meant that the intellectuals confirmed his value, too," he said.
Asked about the typical qualities of the people voting for Gülen, Tokak warned that he would rather speak about why Gülen was voted first. "There are other intellectuals; what makes Gülen distinctive is that he not only thinks and writes, but also puts his ideas into action. He is an intellectual activist. The number of the books written by him is not important, but what is important is the fact that the ideals he mentions in these books are actualized in real life through his guidance," he said.
Özcan Keleş, president of Dialogue Society, which organized an international conference about the Gülen movement in October 2007, told Today's Zaman that the results of the poll revealed that Gülen appeals to an international, young and educated audience. "This is a generation that uses the Internet, reads in English and is open to the world. This is not a Turkish magazine organizing a poll," he said.
Regarding allegations that Gülen's selection was a result of an "organized vote," Keleş said that in an age of where no one has any time, "if one man is able to have hundreds of thousands of people spare some time to enter into a site and vote for him, he is certainly a great man."
Tokak says this should be just a first step in a worldwide confirmation of Gülen's service to world peace. He mentions the answer Gülen himself gave to Foreign Policy's question about who he would vote for. Gülen named John L. Esposito, the American scholar of Islam, as his candidate, because, he said: "For Esposito, Islamophobia is nothing but another threat to world peace. His contributions to interreligious understanding and dialogue are substantial."
Tokak says Gülen's response reveals his worldview: "He yearns for global peace. He works for it, and he encourages his followers to pursue it. Ten years ago he changed our understanding of the 'other.' Until that point, coming together with people of different faiths and races was something foreign to this land. He brought the differences together at his own dinner table. This is a life story that deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, not just a top place in a list of 100 intellectuals."
Though wishful about a Nobel Prize for his "hero," Tokak is not hopeful. "Chingiz Aitmatov clearly deserved a Nobel Prize for Literature. His books were translated into 157 languages. But he passed away recently, without even being named as a candidate. Some people do not get what they deserve," he said. (Kerim Balci, Ankara)
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