Two prestigious Western magazines - Foreign Policy in the United States and Prospect in Britain - asked their readers to choose which among the world’s 100 public intellectuals deserved the top honours.
Over 500,000 people cast their votes via the internet. The results published this July were surprising. The first ten names on the list were Muslims, from countries as diverse as Turkey, Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, Iran and Uganda.
Heading the list was the Turkish Sufi scholar, Fethullah Gülen. He was followed - in order of voters’ preference - by Muhammad Yunus, the microfinancier from Bangladesh; Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian cleric who hosts the popular “Sharia and Life” TV programme on Al-Jazeera in Qatar; the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk; the Pakistani lawyer and politician Aitzaz Ahsan; the Egyptian television preacher Amr Khaled; the Iranian religious theorist Abdolkarim Soroush; the Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan; the Ugandan cultural anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani; and the Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi.
It is striking that -- for various reasons including hostility and even persecution -- several of these intellectuals have chosen to live outside their native land. Fethullah Gülen lives just outside Philadelphia in the United States; Orhan Pamuk teaches literature at Columbia University, New York; Amr Khaled counsels young second-generation Muslims in Britain; Abdolkarim Soroush lives in Europe and the United States; Tariq Ramadan teaches at Oxford.
The brave Shirin Ebadi, who has won renown throughout the world for her defense of human rights -- especially of women’s and children’s rights -- remains in Iran, although she has faced intense criticism and harassment. Earlier this year, she issued a statement saying that threats against her life and security and those of her family had intensified.
Yet, the top ten list points to the awakening of the Muslim world to modern means of communication. To vote in the Prospect/Foreign Affairs poll required access to the internet. Turkey is said to boast three million Facebook users, more than any country apart from the United States, Britain and Canada, while Persian is said to be the fourth most popular language in the world for internet blogs.
Without wishing to cast doubt on his distinction and personal following, it must be said that Fethullah Gülen won his position at the head of the top ten list largely because of the promotion given to his candidacy by Zaman, Turkey’s highest-selling newspaper with a circulation of 700,000.
Gülen is an unusual Sufi in that his global movement of some five million volunteers and sympathizers is at home with technology, markets and multinational business. His message is that there is no contradiction between science and religion, between the modern world and traditional values, such as faith in God.
Indeed, he attributes the backwardness of many Muslim societies to a neglect of modern knowledge, especially of science. In politics, he has lent his support to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and has encouraged the ruling AK party to embrace human rights and give up any notion of introducing Sharia. However, many hard-line secularists do not trust him, accusing him of being a Trojan horse for political Islam.
Muhammad Yunus has devoted a lifetime to fighting poverty. His Grameen Bank, operating in more than 100 countries, has loaned nearly $7bn in small sums to more than 7 million borrowers -- 97 per cent of them women. Aitzaz Ahsan, president of Pakistan’s Supreme Court Bar Association, was a leading opponent of President Pervez Musharraf and is now a key member of the Pakistan People’s Party.
Although very different, Abdolkarim Soroush and Tariq Ramadan are both distinguished Islamic scholars who attempt to bridge the cultural and religious clash between Islam and the West.
All these thinkers and activists deserve attention and respect -- not least in their native countries. They are a reminder to rulers that the grasp and spread of often abstract ideas by means of higher education is an essential component of a society’s development.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.
Copyright © 2008 Patrick Seale
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