Who is the number one public intellectual in the world? Umberto Eco? Garry Kasparov? Salman Rushdie, Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens? EO Wilson (I thought he went to the big anthill in the sky)?
If you chose Fethullah Güllen, you're not alone. Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy Magazine have
published the results of their survey, and the Turkish Islamic religious leader topped the poll. Other "top public intellectuals" include Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (#3) and Tariq Ramadan (#8).
Other intriguing winners include Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk who was prosecuted for mentioning the Armenian genocide; Pakistani Supreme Court barrister Aitzaz Ahsan, who is seen as a possible successor to Benazir Bhutto; Newsweek reporter Fareed Zakaria who has written stories that laid some of the blame for Islamic atrocities on, gasp, Muslims; and Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, who has been labeled an "enemy of the Islamic Republic" by Iranian clerics.
Word is that Osama Bin Laden, surprisingly not mentioned on the list of public intellectuals, is demanding a recount.
Hugh Fitzgerald, who will always be at or near the top of my list of public intellectuals, provided a link to an article at MEMRI by R. Krespin, that contains some salient quotations from this year's winner, Fethullah Güllen. Prepare to be amazed at the level of intellectual discourse:
"You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers… until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria… like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete, and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it… You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey… Until that time, any step taken would be too early - like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all - in confidence… trusting your loyalty and sensitivity to secrecy. I know that when you leave here - [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and feelings expressed here."
"The philosophy of our service is that we open a house somewhere and, with the patience of a spider, we lay our web, to wait for people to get caught in the web; and we teach those who do. We don't lay the web to eat or consume them, but to show them the way to their resurrection, to blow life into their dead bodies and souls, to give them a life."
Now that the top 10 intellectuals are all Muslims, perhaps we should fold up and submit to the Religion of Peace. Or, maybe we could install a spam-blocker when we take online polls. Whatever is easier.
