Mansoor Moaddel

THE SAUDI PUBLIC SPEAKS: RELIGION, GENDER, AND POLITICS

The fact that 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 were Saudi citizens inevitably raised serious questions about the social conditions that have produced such violent personalities capable of the mass taking of innocent lives and devastating an entire city, if not a nation. Answers were quick to come by, as the U.S. media pointed to the Saudi culture. Charges were made that the youth were brainwashed by the most extremist school in Islam, namely, Wahhabism. The Saudi educational institutions were also blamed for promoting anti-Semitism, anti-Western attitudes, and intolerance of other religions. Saudi society was also condemned for having a corrupt and backward political system. Naturally, in this land of intolerance and authoritarianism, resorting to violence by its inhabitants became a foregone conclusion (Baer 2003; Gold 2003; Schwartz 2002).

Ideology as Episodic Discourse: The Case of the Iranian Revolution

Sociological research on ideology and revolution has been guided by three models: the subjectivist model, which proposes that ideology re-orients disoriented and discontented individuals in situations of social strain; the organizational model, which analyzes ideology in terms of organized contention for power and emphasizes the organizational context in which ideological producers respond to challenges to their authority; and the Marxian model, which attributes causal primacy to class conflict in its analysis of ideological dynamics. I argue for a fourth model, one that treats ideology as an episodic discourse, consisting of general principles, concepts, symbols, and rituals that shape human actions in a particular historical period, and considers a revolutionary phenomenon as a particular mode of historical action constituted by revolutionary ideology. The Iranian Revolution is examined to demonstrate the fruitfulness of the episodic discourse model.

Religious Fundamentalism among Young Muslims in Egypt and Saudi Arabia

Religious fundamentalism is conceived as a distinctive set of beliefs and attitudes toward ones religion, including obedience to religious norms, belief in the universality and immutability of its principles, the validity of its claims, and its indispensability for human happiness. Surveys of Egyptian and Saudi youth, ages 18 25, reveal that respondents with higher levels of fundamentalism are more likely to rely on religious authorities as the source of knowledge about the sociopolitical role of Islam, support religious law, be fatalistic, and feel insecure. They are also less likely to watch TV. Saudi females are more fundamentalist than males, but in Egypt, the opposite held true. Country-specific effects are present, and there are implications for future research.

Religion and women : Islamic modernism versus fundamentalism : Islam and women

This paper explains two diverse religious discourses on women. In Islamic fundamentalism, women are instructed to cover their bodies from head to toe with the exception of the face and hands, barred from performing certain social functions, given an inferior status to men, and preached to accept polygamy. In Islamic modernism, in contrast, a group of theologians advanced a modernist exegesis of the Quran, arriving at an Islamic feminist conception of gender relations. These scholars championed womens rights to education and involvement in social affairs, questioned the existing restrictions on women, criticized mens attitudes and behavior toward women, and rejected polygamy. This paper explains this contrast by analyzing Islamic modernism in Egypt and India and fundamentalism in Iran in terms of the varying discursive context in which debates over women were waged. It argues that Islamic modernism emerged out of a pluralistic environment, and where the ruling elite refrained from directly interfering in ideological debates and religious disputations. Islamic fundamentalism, on the other hand, emerged out of a mono lithic cultural context where the means of culture production were monopolized by a bureaucratic authoritarian state. This paper then discusses the implications of this study for understanding the relationship between religion and women.

The Worldviews of Islamic Publics: The Cases of Egypt, Iran, and Jordan

This paper analyzes the religious beliefs, religiosity, national identity, and attitudes toward Western culture, family, and gender relations of the publics of three Islamic countries. It is based on national representative surveys of 3000 Egyptians, 2532 Iranians, and 1222 Jordanians that were carried out in 2000-2001, as part of the World Values Surveys. We first discuss the views of the respondents concerning key indicators of religious beliefs, religiosity, identity, and attitudes toward Western culture. Then, we describe variations in such values as the ideal number of children, attitudes toward marriage and women, family ties, and trusts in major social institutions in these three countries. Next, we present age and educational differences in religious beliefs, trust in mosque, identity, trust in government, attitude toward women and gender relations. We conclude by pointing to the variation in the nature of the regime as an important determinant of the variations in the worldviews among the public in these three Islamic countries.

Religion and the State: The Singularity of the Jordanian Religious Experience

The history of the Islamic movement in Jordan displays glaring contrasts with its counterparts in other Islamic countries such as Egypt, pre-Revolutionary Iran, and Syria. In a marked departure from a history of violence that characterized the relationship between the state and the Islamic opposition in these countries, the Jordanian Muslim Brothers was not only a peaceful movement but also often defended the state against the challenges of radical ideologies. Following the democratization process launched by the late King Hussein, the Muslim Brothers participated in electoral politics. To adapt itself to the new pluralistic environment, the movement displayed a move toward secularization. This process was reflected in an organizational differentiation and the rationalization of religious discourse. This paper attempts to explain this remarkable phenomenon by first considering the effects of the structure, ideology, and cultural policies of the state and of the development of social classes on the Islamic movement. It then considers the way in which the legal framework and political pluralism in the 1990s contributed to the secularization of the movement.

State-centered vs. Class-centered perspectives on international politics: The case of U.S. and British participation in the 1953 coup against premier Mosaddeq in Iran

Two alternative perspectives—state-centered and class-centered—on state actions 01 are considered. The explanatory power of each of these perspectives is examined by analyzing the behavior of three major political actors in the Iranian oil disputes—the Iranian, the British, and the U.S. governments—using the existing historical evidence. The article supports a class-centered explanation by demonstrating the significance of the International Petroleum Cartel in determining U.S. and British policy towards Iran in this period and the failure of the Iranian bourgeoisie to continue their support of Mosaddeq in the face of economic difficulties resulting from the nationalization of the oil industry. Partial support for a state-centered explanation is also noted. For future research, the utility of considering the state and class as interdependent actors with the specification that the nature of this interdependence is asymmetrical is suggested.

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seduction of Islamism

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seduction of Islamism, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, ISBN 0-2260-0786-3, xii + 346 pp. Miche...

Social Structure versus Perception: A Cross-National Comparison of Self-Rated Health in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and the United States

In the historical traditions of sociology one finds ample evidence that well-being relates to broader social processes. This association was proposed in Marx’s theory of alienation, Durkheim’s studies of suicide, and Weber’s focus on life-chances as the key factor defining one’s position in the social hierarchy. Over time, sociological inquiries increasingly attended to different aspects of well-being, with health constituting one branch of scholarship. In the classical tradition, however, determinants of health were constructed almost exclusively in terms of variations in such social structural arrangements as age, gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. These factors are certainly important. People become ill, and their location in social stratification with regard to age, gender, race/ethnicity, and social class influences the nature of medical attention they receive. Furthermore, people of high socioeconomic status stand a better chance of remaining healthy because they may access higher quality housing, food, and material conditions that enhance life-circumstances. There are, however, considerable variations among individuals within each of these structural arrangements.

Events and Value Change: The Impact of September 11, 2001 on the Worldviews of Egyptians and Moroccans

The significance of an historical event depends on the meaning it carries for the social actors it potentially affects. That meaning is not haphazardly produced but rather structured by the nature of the political and cultural context in which social actors are embedded. That meaning determines whether and how individuals, and entire societies, reexamine their attitudes toward and beliefs about historically significant issues. We tested this proposition by examining how the attitudes of Egyptians and Moroccans were affected by the terrorist act perpetrated by al-Qaeda on 9/11, which was ostensibly carried out not only to avenge the presumed trauma Muslim nations have suffered because of the American-led “Jewish-Crusade” alliance, but also to rally the Islamic publics behind their banner for the construction of a virtuous Islamic order. Based on survey data, our findings indicate that these publics displayed more favorable attitudes toward democracy, gender equality, and secularism after 9/11 than they did before. Accordingly, the event influenced the attitudes of the Egyptian and Moroccan publics in ways contrary to those intended by the radical Islamists. Some effects were also moderated by the respondents’ age, education, and gender. We discuss how these results contribute to the growing body of literature on the role of events in historical and social processes.