Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Sources of Extremism and Moderation in the Living Shariah

政治学博士论文研究：活生生的伊斯兰教法中的极端主义和温和派的根源

• 批准号: 1159298
• 负责人: Beth Simmons
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-04-01 至 2013-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1159298&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Political; Science

This project seeks to measure and explain the ideological stances of Islamic clerics on Jihad, women's issues, and other critical topics. Pronouncements by clerics can have substantial sway among lay Muslims, defining norms of acceptability and permissibility for the entire range of human action. However, we know relatively little about how these clerics formulate and adopt their expressed ideologies. The project will significantly expand our knowledge of political Islam and the measurement of ideology, and the results will be of great value to the scholarly community and policy-makers. The intellectual merit of the study stems from its extension of research on ideology and networking to a critical, but under-studied, group. This study measures and explains cleric ideology by analyzing their fatwas: non-binding but authoritative legal rulings issued by clerics on virtually all aspects of life from foreign policy to daily activities. These fatwas offer a window into the ideology of clerics and their influence on the everyday lives of the more than one billion Muslims world-wide. Fatwas on ordinary religious issues can help shed light on more charged topics, such as why some clerics support militant Jihad.The research focuses on two mechanisms to explain most of the variation in the expressed ideologies of clerics. First, clerics are deeply influenced by their teachers; ideologies are spread through the social network of teacher-student relationships. Second, clerics are influenced by incentives to strategically adopt ideological positions to further their careers. These theoretical arguments are tested using a new database of historical and contemporary Arabic-language fatwas collected from a variety of archival and Internet resources. Due to the scale of the data, over 200,000 fatwas in are included in the pilot database, the research design incorporates close reading with statistical text analysis methods to draw valid, general conclusions about the ideological diversity of Islam, the reasons that clerics choose certain ideological positions, and the effects of cleric ideologies on the beliefs and actions of lay Muslims.The project's broader impacts are particularly associated with the value of this research to the policy community. This research will substantially improve our understanding of the ideologies and political stances of Islamic clerics in the Middle East. These clerics are extremely influential, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring, but they are not well understood. Discovering why some clerics moderate while others become extreme will help policy-makers undertaking diplomacy, counter-terrorism, and democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East.

该项目旨在衡量和解释伊斯兰神职人员在圣战、妇女问题和其他关键问题上的意识形态立场。神职人员的声明可以在穆斯林中产生重大影响，为整个人类行为的可接受性和可允许性确定规范。然而，我们对这些神职人员如何制定和采用他们所表达的意识形态知之甚少。该项目将大大扩展我们对政治伊斯兰教和意识形态测量的知识，其结果将对学术界和政策制定者具有重要价值。这项研究的学术价值源于它将意识形态和网络研究扩展到一个关键的，但研究不足的群体。本研究通过分析教令来衡量和解释神职人员的意识形态：教令是神职人员对从外交政策到日常活动的几乎所有方面发出的不具约束力但具有权威性的法律的裁决。这些法特瓦提供了一个窗口，让我们了解神职人员的意识形态及其对全世界10亿多穆斯林日常生活的影响。 对普通宗教问题的裁决可以帮助阐明更激烈的话题，例如为什么一些神职人员支持激进的圣战组织。这项研究集中在两个机制上，以解释神职人员表达的意识形态的大部分变化。首先，神职人员深受老师的影响;意识形态通过师生关系的社交网络传播。其次，神职人员受到激励的影响，战略性地采取意识形态立场，以促进他们的职业生涯。这些理论的论点进行测试，使用一个新的数据库的历史和当代阿拉伯语法特瓦收集各种档案和互联网资源。由于数据的规模，超过200，000教令被纳入试点数据库，研究设计结合了近距离阅读与统计文本分析方法，以得出关于伊斯兰教意识形态多样性的有效，一般性结论，神职人员选择某些意识形态立场的原因，以及神职人员的意识形态对穆斯林信徒的信仰和行为的影响。该项目更广泛的影响尤其与这项研究对政策界的价值有关。这项研究将大大提高我们对中东伊斯兰神职人员的意识形态和政治立场的理解。这些神职人员非常有影响力，特别是在阿拉伯之春之后，但他们并没有得到很好的理解。 了解为什么有些神职人员温和，而另一些则变得极端，将有助于决策者在中东开展外交，反恐和促进民主的努力。