Fethullah Gulen tops the Foreign Policy Magazine's World's Top Intellectuals list

(Video Duration: 1 min. 1 sec.)

Turkish intellectual Fethullah Gülen, one of the world's most influential Islamic scholars, has come out as the number one in the competition for the list for “The World’s Top 20 Public Intellectuals” organized by the Foreign Policy magazine. The survey, closely watched by millions all over the world, showed the top 10 were all Muslim scholars including two Nobel laureates, the novelist Orhan Pamuk, who is also Turkish, at No 4, and the Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, in 10th.

Among the top 20 list were activist Noam Chomsky who is best known for his scathing criticisms of U.S. foreign policy extending back to the Vietnam War; Former Vice President Al Gore who championed global warming campaign; historian Bernard Lewis who is one of the foremost historians of the Middle East; Umberto Eco who is famous novelist in Italy; Amartya Sen who is the premier welfare economist of the 20th century; Fareed Zakaria who is the Editor of Newsweek International and Gary Kasparov, who is democracy activist and chess grandmaster from Russia.

Washington-based Foreign Policy (FP) magazine, in May/June issue, published a list of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals in the World" and asked from its readers to cast a ballot for the top 20 which it promised to publish in the current issue. The magazine said they did not expect “an avalanche of voters” as half a million people came to foreignpolicy.com site to pick their favorite candidate, adding that “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.”