WHO SPEAKS FOR ISLAM?
Author | Ruth, David |
Position | RELIGION - Survey |
WHO speaks for Islam and who holds religious authority in the Middle East? A study from Rice University's Institute for Public Policy aims to provide answers by identifying the channels of influence between religious leaders who claim to hold Islamic authority and individual Muslims across the region.
The findings depict a complex religious space in the Middle East that reflects its citizens' nuanced approach toward religion and the religion-politics relationship, says A. Kadir Yildirim, fellow for the Middle East at the Institute, who oversaw the study.
As part of the study, the researchers conducted a 12-country public opinion survey that asked nearly 16,500 respondents their views on 82 religious leaders. The survey included direct questions about the respondents' approval of--and trust in--these religious leaders. Because of the sensitive nature of the topic, the researchers also aimed to gauge the respondents' views of these religious leaders indirectly, Yildirim indicates. To this end, they used endorsement experiments.
"This experimental design allows us to make a series of religious statements the focus of the respondents' evaluation instead of the religious leaders themselves," he writes. "The combination of alternative methods to map religious authority in the region enables us to reach a more-comprehensive set of conclusions than we would be able to by using a single method."
The researchers found that the popularity and religious influence of Islamist actors vary across the region. "On one hand, Islamist figures obtained notable levels of approval from respondents in most countries in our survey. Likewise, they were found to be trustable at significant levels compared to most other figures.
"On the other hand, survey respondents were notably more lukewarm about Islamists when asked about their views on religiopolitical issues in our endorsement experiments. Islamist names typically garnered negative scores in our endorsement experiments, indicating that respondents were more likely to disagree with a statement when it was endorsed by an Islamist leader."
The study fundamentally challenges the conventional wisdom on state religious officials, Yildirim declares. "Our study shows that state-affiliated religious leaders have largely outperformed our expectations in terms of having the trust and approval of large segments of respondents in all...
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