After the lists of top international figures, women, inventors, writers and chefs, I stumbled upon a list of the top one hundred thinkers, which started with the most influential Arabs who rose to prominence during the current uprisings. I found the list worth presenting to the readers, as it was published by Foreign Policy Magazine, a moderate and reputable publication that runs fine articles. The first place here is in reality the first nine places, distributed between one or two winners, including men and women who played a role in the Arab uprisings. The first thinker in order of publication was Alaa Aswani, the Egyptian novelist who wrote ‘The Yacoubian Building', and who was chosen, because of his role in the Kefaya movement and subsequent activism in Tahrir Square against the Mubarak regime. The two other individuals who shared with him the first place and who were listed directly after him were Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei and Wael Ghoneim, who were also chosen, because of their opposition to the Mubarak regime, and their roles in the revolution- ElBaradei as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and international figure, and Ghoneim as a young leader and new media figure. After that came Ali Ferzat and Razan Zaitoune. Ferzat is a cartoonist; the Syrian intelligence services broke his hands after he drew a cartoon showing Bashar al-Assad attempting to ride in Muammar Gaddafi's car to escape with him. Zaitoune, on the other hand, was honored for her work in the Syrian human rights movement since 2001. She had also been awarded an international prize for women active during wars. In first place as well came Rashid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Al-Nahda Party, who was chosen for the list before his party won the elections in Tunisia, and Khairat el-Shater, the Muslim Brotherhood's top businessman who spent years in Mubarak's prisons. Shater has constantly tried his best to reassure people about the policies and attitudes of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then there is Tawakkol Karman, the young Yemeni dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize this year along with two other women. The next choice for first place was Waddah Khanfar, the director of Al-Jazeera. However, his resignation means that he is now outside of the circle of intellectual leadership. At any rate, FP praised Al-Jazeera's work against the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and its coverage of the youth revolution in Tahrir Square. Next came Manal al-Sharif and Eman al-Najfan, the first for her role in the campaign to allow Saudi women to drive and her courage in challenging an informal ban on driving for women, and the second in appreciation for her English-language website on Saudi women's news, which the magazine sees as an important source of information about them. There is also Fathi Terbil, the Libyan human rights activist who challenged Gaddafi's regime until it collapsed, and who had revealed details of the massacre that claimed the lives of 1200 detainees in the Abu Salim prison. Trailing behind the twelve former Arab men and women, the list concluded with two non-Arab writers, who are the Americans Srđa Popović and Gene Sharp, owing to their work in groups that call for peaceful regime change, and both men had written books explaining how to achieve this. Fourteen men and women shared the first nine places, as the magazine sometimes placed two names in the same rank, because of the similarity of what they do. In the end, everyone won, because the first place went to the Arab "revolutionaries". Despite the title “Top one hundred thinkers”, the selections included more than 130 men and women, in my opinion, because many names were placed in the same rank simultaneously. For example, the tenth rank, after those who occupied the first nine places, went to Ben Bernanke, Jean-Claude Trichet and Jo Xiaochuan, i.e. an American, a French / European man and a Chinese man, thanks to their respective roles in addressing the global financial crisis. I have run out of space. I am in fact summarizing, in journalistic haste, a list that occupied 122 pages with many articles about it: So I found Barack Obama in 11th place, followed by Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice (12), whom I consider to be war criminals in the invasion of Iraq. Next were Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ahmet Davutoglu (16), and Bill and Hillary Clinton (20) followed by Nicolas Sarkozy, Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad (28). There were many interesting names of people I consider to be war criminals or warmongers. Nonetheless, the Arab selections were an objective Western testimonial in favor of our men and women, because the rule remains that there is no dignity for Arab thinkers in their own countries. [email protected]
