Pious politics: Political theology in the Arab world and beyond
General Material Designation
[Thesis]
First Statement of Responsibility
Brandon Chase Gorman
Subsequent Statement of Responsibility
Kurzman, Charles
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2016
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
127
GENERAL NOTES
Text of Note
Committee members: Bail, Christopher A.; Caren, Neal; Jamal, Amaney A.; Perrin, Andrew
NOTES PERTAINING TO PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC.
Text of Note
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-01462-4
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Discipline of degree
Sociology
Body granting the degree
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Text preceding or following the note
2016
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
In this dissertation, I investigate the correlates and contents of Islam-centered political ideas among individual Muslims using a combination of survey data, cognitive interview data, and text data gathered from Arabic-language online messageboards. In the Chapters 2 and 3, I find that Muslims tend to support shari'a law and other Islamist political values do not systematically object to liberal global norms like democracy and human rights. The fourth chapter builds on these findings by exploring how Muslims discuss these issues online using a combination of dictionary-based and unsupervised text classification techniques on a sample of 214,861 posts made on the Arabic-language messageboard majalisna.com. I find that posters on this messageboard take issue with global norms not because of the content of the norms themselves, but because of their relationship with the West and powerful global actors. These results 1) provide evidence that the divide between Islamists and non-Islamists in the Muslim world is not as stark as the scholarly literature would otherwise suggest and 2) show that the expansion of international institutions and global culture can lead to both isomorphism and differentiation in local attitudes and practices.
TOPICAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Religion; Middle Eastern Studies; Political science; Sociology
UNCONTROLLED SUBJECT TERMS
Subject Term
Philosophy, religion and theology;Social sciences;Democracy;Islamism;Mixed methods;Text analysis;World culture