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.
What makes some Sunni Muslim clerics embrace the tenets of radical Jihadism while most clerics reject them? This question is of vital importance to countries facing threats from Jihadist terrorism and for the scholars who study the causes of political violence, but surprisingly, most academic scholarship has ignored clerics and instead focused on Jihadi "foot soldiers." Much of the research on these lay Jihadi terrorists has concluded that they are partially idea-takers who are influenced by idea-makers such as clerics. In my dissertation, I uncover surprising dynamics explaining why some clerics turn to Jihadist ideology. I first combine technology from computer science, statistics, and computational linguistics to develop new technology for assessing any Arabic-language text for Jihadist content. This technology could be applied broadly -- I use it to measure Jihadist ideology in the writings of 101 Muslim clerics. Then, I collect biographical information about these clerics to find the characteristics of clerics' professional backgrounds and personal lives that correlate with support for Jihadism. I find strong support for a surprising proposition: clerics are more likely to become radical Jihadists when they lack strong academic networks that give access to secure, well-paying jobs within the traditional ranks of the clerical hierarchy. Future clerics with strong connections to prominent advisors have only on a 5 percent chance of becoming Jihadist, but almost 50 percent of clerics with zero academic advisors in my study become Jihadists. This suggests that current policies for reducing the spread of Jihadism such as drone strikes and prison terms for ideologues could be supplemented with interventions that work much earlier in clerics' lives to push them away from professional paths that lead to Jihadism.
