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

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话题上的意识形态立场。神职人员的宣示可以在世俗穆斯林中产生重大影响，为人类行动的整个范围定义可接受性和允许性的标准。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。该项目将极大地扩展我们对政治伊斯兰教的了解和对意识形态的衡量，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对意识形态和网络的研究扩展到一个关键但未得到充分研究的群体。这项研究通过分析神职人员的法令来衡量和解释神职人员的意识形态：神职人员发布的无约束力但权威的法律裁决，几乎涉及生活的方方面面，从外交政策到日常活动。这些教令为了解神职人员的意识形态以及他们对全球超过10亿穆斯林日常生活的影响提供了一个窗口。关于普通宗教问题的法特瓦有助于解释更多敏感的话题，比如为什么一些神职人员支持激进的圣战。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差异。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会网络传播。其次，神职人员受到采取战略性意识形态立场以推进其职业生涯的激励措施的影响。使用从各种档案和互联网资源中收集的历史和当代阿拉伯语法特瓦的新数据库，对这些理论论点进行了检验。由于数据的规模，试点数据库中包含了20多万名教士，研究设计结合了近距离阅读和统计文本分析方法，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，以及神职人员意识形态对世俗穆斯林信仰和行动的影响。该项目的更广泛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。发现为什么一些神职人员温和，而另一些神职人员变得极端，将有助于决策者在中东开展外交、反恐和民主促进努力。

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.