Fethullah who?

Of popularity contests and public intellectuals

This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.

Foreign Policy magazine, Rohit Pradhan alerts us, has published the results of their poll to find the top 100 public intellectuals.

And on top of that heap is Fethullah Gülen. Now that we know that he is the top public intellectual, we might perhaps get to know a little bit more about his intellectualism. Wikipedia tells us that he is Turkish, the head of the Gülen movement, a modernist Islamic scholar, author of 60 books and never married.

Second on the list is Bangladesh’s very own Mohammad Yunus, he of the Grameen Bank fame. But public intellectual? Hmm. Next come Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, Orhan Pamuk, Aitzaz Ahsan, Amr Khaled, Abdolkarim Soroush, Tariq Ramadan, Mahmood Mamdani, Shirin Ebadi. Hey, why are the top ten public intellectuals representatives of moderate Islam?

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