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>> 1 Introduction The World’s Most Influential Public Intellectual Truth can be established and supported in many ways . . . if a place of worship rouses its community with thoughts of eternity, if a school awakens hope and faith in its pupils, they are serving their purpose and therefore are sacred. If this is not the case, they are no more than devilish traps diverting us from the truth. We may apply the same standards to unions, trusts, political institutions, and societies in general. —M. Fethullah Gülen In a 2005 poll administered to determine “the world’s most influential public intellectual,” the U.S. political magazine Foreign Policy (FP), together with its British affiliate, Prospect, published an unranked list of one hundred people whom their editors believed to be the most impactful opinion makers, political leaders, policy advisers, activists, and scholars in the world. Included on the 2005 list were two Turkish citizens, the best-selling fiction writer Orhan Pamuk, and the longtime World Bank and United Nations economist and former Turkish parliamentarian Kemal Dervış. After twenty thousand votes were cast, Pamuk finished fifty-fourth, Dervış sixty-seventh. Self-critiqued as unscientific, the poll was hailed as a thought-provoking exercise concerning “the grand tradition of oppositional intellectuals.” When the critical philosopher Noam Chomsky won by more than 4,800 votes, the FP/Prospect editors concluded that even in the “post-ideological” era of globalization, there was still very much a market for fervent social critique and oppositional public debate (Herman 2005). Revising their methods for generating an unranked list of one hundred influential public intellectuals, in 2008 FP and Prospect administered their poll for a second time. In his introduction to the publication 2 > 3 hundred countries. The GM first emerged as a social network of young men who were inspired by Fethullah Gülen’s applied articulation of the teachings of a preceding Turkish faith-community leader, Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (1877–1960). With modest beginnings that date back to the late 1960s in the western Turkish city of Edirne, Gülen first attracted a following when he worked as a religious functionary in Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). By the late 1970s, Fethullah Gülen was attracting increasingly larger crowds to his public sermons. Motivated by his oratory skills, passion, and projected wisdom, Gülen’s early admirers were moved by his ability to intellectually link an applied understanding of Nursi’s teachings with the challenges of late-industrial Turkey. Instructed to focus their attention on educating Turkey’s youth in mathematics and in the natural/physical sciences, throughout the 1970s GM affiliates established a number of student dormitories, summer camps, and afterschool programs in Turkey’s largest cities. They also began to disseminate Gülen’s teachings via audiocassettes, print publications , and VHS recordings. In the context of a military junta in 1980– 1983, followers of Fethullah Gülen found opportunity in a nationally underdeveloped private education sector. Throughout the 1980s, students at what are now most commonly referred to as “Gülen-inspired schools” (GISs) began to score noticeably higher than their counterparts on nationwide high school and university placement exams, and began to earn countrywide recognition by winning national scholastic competitions with regularity. In the same period, GM affiliates also became active in publishing, light manufacture, construction, and media. In all sectors GM activities became increasingly more reliant on the support of an expanding cohort of socially conservative entrepreneurs who emerged in the context of a transformative period of Turkish liberalization. In the early 1990s, GM-affiliated actors seized on opportunities to expand their education, media, and business initiatives abroad, initially to the newly independent countries in Central Asia and the Balkans, and later to Russia, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Also at this time, affiliated business interests consolidated into a number of regionally defined trade associations, and in 1996 a small group of affiliated business leaders opened Turkey’s first 100 percent Turkish-owned 4 > 5 newspaper and the flagship brand under the larger GM-affiliated media corporation Feza Gazetecilik (Feza Media Group). The poll was also widely publicized on each of Feza’s three television stations, on its national radio station, and on the pages of Feza’s numerous other print publications,2 as well as on each of the GM’s twenty-five “official” websites ,3 and on dozens of other open-source web forums. On the Yahoo! e-mail groups “Fethullah Gülen” (fethullah_gulen, 1,751 members), “Turkish schools...

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