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Fethullah Gülen - the world's most influential intellectual

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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 Muha...