Fethullah Gülen - the world's most influential intellectual

Today I read a brief article in the Swiss Newspaper NZZ about the newly published ranking of the top 100 living intellectuals. Over a half million people voted over the Internet to find out the World's top intellectuals in a vote organized by the UK magazine "Prospect and Foreign Policy". This was a rerun of a campaign that concluded in 2005 that Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco were the most influential intellectuals.

This time, early leaders were Maria Vargas Llosa, Gary Kasparov, and Al Gore. But then a campaign was organized for the Turkish islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen, leading him to a resounding victory.
According to Prospect, the leading Turkish newspaper Zaman with a circulation of over 700000 succeeded in rallying its readers behind Fethullah Gülen. However, other newspapers in Indonesia, Bulgaria, or Malaysia launched similar campaigns, with little success.
Here are the top 12 intellectuals (in parenthesis is the ranking of 2005):
1 Fethullah Gülen (*)
2 Muhammad Yunus (*)
3 Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (56)
4 Orhan Pamuk (54)
5 Aitzaz Ahsan (*)
6 Amr Khaled (*)
7 Abdolkarim Soroush (15)
8 Tariq Ramadan (58)
9 Mahmood Mamdani (*)
10 Shirin Ebadi (12)
11 Noam Chomsky (1)
12 Al Gore (*)

There are now quite a few claims that the campaign does not reflect the real world, so I was curious to see what our Coolhunting with Condorview would tell.
Here is the resulting picture:

as well as the spiderweb of Web sites which "voted" Fethullah Gülen to victory


Amazingly, our Coolhunting pretty much confirms the ranking in Prospect and Foreign Policy, although I only checked for five people out of the 100. And none of the top Web sites "voting" for Fethullah Gülen was the Zaman Web site. So it could well be that the Prospect and Foreign Policy poll indeed mirrors global intellectual influence, as the Internet is being used more and more actively also in the developing world outside of the Western World, where a large fraction of the population is Muslim, or at least Anti-US.

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 21, 2009 at 12:49 PM

    Gulen Movement in action. Biography of Fethullah Gulen.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownOctober 26, 2009 at 10:50 PM

    NY Times writes about Gulen.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/world/asia/04islam.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. marcoNovember 5, 2009 at 11:29 AM

    I read some article but i think this is better -> http://www.cejiss.org/articles/vol3-1/el-hussari/

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousDecember 20, 2009 at 8:47 PM

    I read his some books and articles. He is a great philosopher. Here is the some links give information about him:
    http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/18/turkey-islam-gulen-cx_0121oxford.html

    http://fethullahgulenconference.org/houston/read.php?p=fethullah-gulen-contribution-muslim-christian-dialogue-abrahamic-cooperation

    http://fethullahgulenconference.org/houston/read.php?p=fethullah-gulen-vision-transcendent-education

    ReplyDelete
  5. alikochisarJanuary 7, 2010 at 1:06 PM

    This is my collaboration to you guys about Mr. Gulen. The article on the link is about his approaches to have such world in peace by "A Dialogue of Civilizations: Gulen's Islamic Ideals and Humanistic Discourse"

    http://www.rambles.net/carroll_dialog07.html

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousJanuary 9, 2010 at 1:48 PM

    Here are some links which make you get more information about Mr. Fethullah Gulen and his movements.

    http://gulenconference.org.uk/userfiles/file/Proceedings/Prcd%20-%20Cetin,%20M.pdf

    http://gulenconference.org.uk/userfiles/file/Proceedings/Prcd%20-%20Keles,%20O.pdf

    http://fethullahgulenconference.org/dallas/read.php?p=islam-and-terror-from-perspective-of-fethullah-gulen

    ReplyDelete
  7. TurkeyEmergencyComDecember 17, 2011 at 5:07 AM

    The comments on here are propaganda. How can a primary school graduate be considered an intellectual?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Predicting Stock Market Indicators Through Twitter “I hope it is not as bad as I fear”

Image
We have been working on trying to predict market indicators for quite some time by analyzing Web Buzz , predicting who will win an Oscar, or how well movies do at the box office . Among other things we have correlated posts about a stock on Yahoo Finance and Motley’s Fool with the actual stock price, predicting the closing price of the stock on the next day based on what people say today on Yahoo Finance, on the Web and Blogs about a stock title. The rising popularity of twitter gives us a new great way of capturing the collective mind up to the last minute. In our current project we analyze the positive and negative mood of the masses on twitter, comparing it with broad stock market indices such as Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ. We collected the twitter feeds from one whitelisted IP for six months from March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009, ranging from 5680 to 42820 tweets per day. According to twitter this corresponds to a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volum...
Read more

My life in Alternative Realities - fatherlanders and nerds don’t go well together

Image
We are all living in different alternative realities, people with different personalities see reality from very different perspectives, potentially leading to a lot of friction and misunderstandings. “Nerds” are open to change, they believe in the progress of technology and innovation. “Fatherlanders” abhor change, they like tradition and authority, valuing the fatherland above all, and would like to reestablish the good old times. “Spiritualists” believe into supernatural forces, they are religious, meditate and hope that the forces of nature will heal their ailing. “Treehuggers” believe into sustainability and global warming, they want to save nature by restricting technical progress. I experience  this friction frequently in my daily life. As a computer and technology nerd with spiritualist and treehugger inclinations, my communication with members from other tribes sometimes does not end well.  My interactions with officers of the US Department of Homeland Security and the...
Read more

How Blind Trust in Generative AI Undermines Creative Work

Image
This summer, we experienced firsthand the damage caused by blind faith in the "superhuman" capabilities of generative AI, even among otherwise intelligent individuals. Here's what happened. We submitted a research paper to an academic conference, and after it was accepted, I paid the registration fee, booked flights, and arranged accommodations. A week later, we received an abrupt email from the organizers stating that our paper had been rejected. The reason? Their AI-based plagiarism and ChatGPT-detection tool flagged it as containing both plagiarized content and text generated by ChatGPT. This accusation was entirely unfounded. Our paper presented highly original work by our team, proposing novel AI algorithms to predict animal emotions—a concept never explored before. We detailed the development of an AI model to validate this approach, something completely unique to our research. By its very nature, it was impossible for our work to be plagiarized or generated by Chat...
Read more