It’s been a good week for Fethullah Gülen this week. Some of you, like the readers of Prospect magazine might be hearing that name for the first time and wondering who he is. Well according to the recent poll in said magazine he is the world’s number one intellectual thinker. Prospect is a monthly magazine for thinkers published in the UK, it specialises in politics and current affairs and first received worldwide attention in October 2005 when it published its list of the world’ s top one hundred public intellectuals won by Noam Chomsky. İt ran the same competition again this year and is recieveing a similar amount of publicity this year because the top ten sages were all Muslim and Fethullah the champion amongst them.

Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish cleric, a former state imam for twenty years he finally broke away from state sponsored İslam to found his own movement. Strongly inspired by Sufi thinking, he places İslam at the heart of every person rather than at the heart of the state or government and is inspired by divine love. Popular with middle class Turkish intelligensia he is admired for his peaceful prononcements on the İslamic religion and has won world wide support for his message of tolerance, mutual understanding and respect. For example on the contentious subject of jihad (so often interpreted as the holy war on infidels by muslims) Gülen’s interpretation is typical of his emphasis on the personal rather than the political, the gentle way rather than the militant, for him jihad is the individual’s struggle against Satan; ‘Jihad is purification and seeking perfection to please God; cleansing the mind, by means of Qur’anic verses, from false preconceptions, thoughts, and superstitions; expelling impurities from the heart through prayer; asking for forgiveness; austerity (riyada); and studying the Book, wisdom, and other knowledge with a purified heart and mind.’ (Fethullah Gülen, in an interview with the Italian Journalist Michele Zanzucchi)

However despite his popularity with some groups others are highly suspicious. They see Fethullah as a deceiver preaching İslam-lite as a front for other overeaching purposes. They claim the thousands of private schools he has established throughout Turkey, Central Asia and as far away as Kenya and Cambodia are hot houses for a new generation of Gülenci thinkers whose aim is to infaltrate every part of their national society in preparation for the anticipated Islamic revolution. They may be this but they are also the best schools Turkey has academically outperforming all other sectors of secondary education public and private. Many non-Gülenci parents vie to get their children enrolled as students in much the same way that former Church of England lapsed christians in the UK find a sudden interest in catholicism when it comes to getting their children places at the best faith schools.

Not satisfied with the stealth factor involved in  long term education programme his opponents highlight the fact that the movement controls charities, real estate and companies worth several billion dollars as if this in itself were threatening. The Gülen movement has its own universities, businessmens unions, lobbies, student groups, radio and television stations and the Zaman newspaper group. Turkish officials concede that Gülen's followers in Turkey number more than a million and Gülen's backers claim that number is just the tip of the iceberg. Certainly under the stewardship of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, one of Gülen's most prominent sympathizers, tens of thousands of other Gülen supporters are believed to have entered the Turkish bureaucracy. On the other hand perhaps these men and women are the most capable and best trained administrators the country has being by and large the products of the best schools in Turkey? 

Despite the internal debate about the relative merits of Fethullah Gülen and his philosophy how did he come to be voted the world’s greatest public intellectual? Tom Nuttall of Prospect Magazine explains; ‘The early running this year was made by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, and Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster turned anti-Putin dissident. But then, about a week into the process, Fethullah Gülen rocketed to the top of the list overnight—and stayed there. Something had clearly happened: votes were pouring in for Gülen at a staggering rate, and continued to do so for the duration of the poll. Initially we were convinced that a tech-savvy member of the Fethullahçi......had hacked into the system and set about auto-voting for his hero. The truth turned out to be more interesting. On 1st May, Zaman—the highest-selling newspaper in Turkey, with a circulation of over 700,000 and a string of international editions—ran a story on its front page alerting its readership to the appearance of Gülen on the Prospect/FP list, and to the fact that we were inviting people to vote. The poll was also noted in other Turkish newspapers, as well as on every single Gülen website, official and unofficial, we were able to find.’

The results are interesting not ust because the poll was hijacked but because it displayed the phenomenal networking of Gülen’s supporters and the devotion of the Turks to becoming number one (there was a similar event when Time magazine nominated Atatürk as their Man of the Century which he subsequently won). A Bulgarian newspaper ran a simliar campaign for their man, political scientist Ivan Krastev, but the public were not roused. Similar campaigns in Indonesia, Canada, India and Spain also had little impact. At a time in history when islam is most misunderstood and villified it cannot do any harm to have one of it’s positive proponents in the headlines. İf every Prospect reader takes the time to study Fethullah Gülen’s philosophy the world will be a more enlightened place. 

If you want to learn a little more about Fethullah Gülen follow this link to his book Pearls of Wisdom -  http://www.fethullahgulenconference.org/resources/books/pearls.pdf