WASHINGTON: The bimonthly US international affairs journal Foreign Policy has just published a survey of the world’s top 20 public intellectuals and the first 10 are all Muslims.

Turkey’s Fethullah Gülen, who heads a network of schools and media that is probably the world’s largest moderate Muslim movement, came first.

Other Muslim religious personalities made the top 10 — weekly preacher on al-Jazeera satellite television Youssef al-Qaradawi (3rd), popular Egyptian television preacher Amr Khaled (6th), Iranian reformist theologian Abdolkarim Soroush (7th), and Swiss-born scholar Tariq Ramadan (8th).

Second was Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for the microcredit project run by his Grameen Bank.

Several top-tenners besides Yunus made the list for their secular work.

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, came in fourth. Next was Aitzaz Ahsan, the Lahore lawyer whose lawyers’ protest movement is possibly the strongest voice of secular civil society in Pakistan. Ninth and tenth places went to Ugandan-born cultural anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani and Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize.

Half a million people visited the foreignpolicy.com site to pick their favorite candidate.