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

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

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.