Suchergebnisse

Much of the Middle East and North Africa still appears to be in a transitional period set in motion by the 2011 Arab uprisings, and the political trajectory of the region remains difficult to grasp. In The Clash of Values, Mansoor Moaddel provides groundbreaking empirical data to demonstrate how the collision between Islamic fundamentalism and liberal nationalism explains the region's present and will determine its future. Analyzing data from over 60,000 face-to-face interviews of nationally representative samples of people in seven countries - Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey - Moaddel reveals the depth and breadth of the conflict of values. He develops measures of expressive individualism, gender equality, secularism, and religious fundamentalism and shows that the factors that strengthen liberal values also weaken fundamentalism. Moaddel highlights longitudinal data showing changes in orientations toward secular politics, Western-type government, religious tolerance, national identity, and to a limited extent gender equality, as well as a significant decline in support for political Islam, over the past decade. Focusing on these trends, he contends that the Arab Spring represents a new phase of collective action rooted in the spread of the belief in individual liberty. Offering a rigorous and deeply researched perspective on social change, The Clash of Values disentangles the Middle East and North Africa's political complexity and pinpoints a crucial trend toward liberal nationalism.

Thirteen years after the Shah of Iran was swept away in a tide of revolutionary fervor, the cruelty and brutality of the new regime remains shocking. In Class, Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution, Mansoor Moaddel provides the theoretical underpinnings for a richer and clearer understanding of Iran's tumultuous recent history. Analyzing the causes and processes of the revolution through the prisms of class, politics, and ideology, Moaddel argues that the currently dominant theories of revolution insufficiently address the requisite question of ideology: "Ideology is not simply another factor that adds an increment to the causes of revolution. Ideology is the constitutive feature of revolution." Moaddel explains how revolutionary conditions in Iran were created by a combination of state economic policies favoring international capital - which enraged segments of the powerful bourgeoisie - and fluctuations in the world economy that financially weakened Iran. But the central element of the revolutionary crisis of the late 1970s was the development of Shi'i revolutionary discourse as the dominant ideology. As liberalism and communism declined, the potent discourse of revolutionary Islam - with its martyrdom, its religious rituals, its symbolic structures - formed a powerful conduit for popular mobilization. Karl Marx likened the French Revolution to a gigantic broom which swept away all the "medieval rubbish." Drawing from his abundant theoretical, historical, and sociological knowledge, Moaddel illuminates the process by which the gigantic broom of the Iranian Revolution "swept all the medieval rubbish back in