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主题上的意识形态立场。神职人员的发音可能会在外行穆斯林之间实质性摇摆，从而定义了对整个人类行动范围的可接受性和允许性的规范。但是，我们对这些神职人员如何制定和采用其表达的意识形态的了解相对较少。该项目将大大扩大我们对政治伊斯兰教的了解和意识形态的衡量，结果对学术界和政策制定者具有很大的价值。这项研究的智力优点源于其对意识形态和网络的研究扩展到关键但不足的群体。这项研究通过分析其FATWA：神职人员对文职人员对从外交政策到日常活动的几乎所有生活方面发出的无约束力但权威的法律裁决来衡量和解释牧师意识形态。这些FATWA为神职人员的意识形态提供了一个窗口，及其对全球超过10亿穆斯林的日常生活的影响。 FATWA在普通宗教问题上可以帮助阐明更多充满活力的话题，例如为什么有些牧师支持激进的圣战。该研究重点介绍了两种机制来解释表达的牧师意识形态的大多数变化。首先，牧师受到教师的深刻影响。意识形态通过教师关系的社交网络传播。其次，牧师受到战略性采取意识形态立场以进一步发展职业的激励措施的影响。这些理论论点是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FATWA的新数据库进行了测试的。由于数据的规模，在试点数据库中包括超过200,000个FATWA，研究设计将近距离阅读与统计文本分析方法结合在一起，以得出有关伊斯兰教的意识形态多样性的有效的一般结论，牧师选择某些意识形态立场的原因，以及牧师意识形态对群体的影响和行动的影响与群体的影响与项目的影响相关。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。这些神职人员具有极大的影响力，尤其是在阿拉伯之春之后，但它们并不理解。 发现为什么有些牧师会在中东进行外交，反恐和民主促进努力的政策制定者中，而有些牧师会有助于政策制定者。