"The World's Most Influential Public Intellectual"

Joshua Hendrick’s new book on Gulen - Gulen: The Ambiguous Politics of Market Islam in Turkey and the World - opens with an introduction with that title.

Teasers:

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…After four weeks and more than five hundred thousand votes, Fethullah Gülen was named “the world’s most influential public intellectual” by a wide margin (Nuttal 2008). The July 2008 edition of Prospect magazine subsequently published a series of articles asking the question—who is Fethullah Gülen?

More relevant to the charter school finance theme of this blog:

Indeed, access to public funding via the expanding “school choice” system in the United States has produced an environment whereby, with approximately 130 schools as of March 2012, the United States hosts more “Gulen-inspired schools” than does any country in the world outside Turkey.

This book is worth the money no matter the price.

I wrote the other day that “there is no conspiracy" when it comes to the school privatization forces in the United States.

In the English language only the word “conspiracy” applies to what Gulen’s adherents have - shockingly, shamefully, successfully - set up in their network of charter schools here.  

The more important question is: what are we prepared to do to force the necessary public debate about this conspiracy?