"Jihadi Radicalization of Muslim Clerics" Nielsen 2012
"I argue that clerics strategically adopt or reject Jihadi ideology because of career incentives generated by the structure of cleric educational networks. Well-connected clerics enjoy substantial success at pursuing comfortable careers within state-run religious institutions and they reject Jihadi ideology in exchange for continued material support from the state. Clerics with poor educational networks cannot rely on connections to advance through the state-run institutions, so many pursue careers outside of the system by appealing directly to lay audiences for support. These clerics are more likely to adopt Jihadi ideology because it helps them demonstrate to potential supporters that they have not been theologically coopted by political elites. I provide evidence of these dynamics by collecting and analyzing 29,430 fatwas, articles, and books written by 91 contemporary clerics. Using statistical natural language processing, I measure the extent to which each cleric adopts Jihadi ideology in their writing. I combine this with biographical and network information about each cleric to trace the process by which poorly-connected clerics become more likely to adopt Jihadi ideology.
Most clerics support themselves by holding paid positions as Imams, teachers, bureaucrats, and advisors in the state-run systems of mosques, universities, and ministries of their respective countries. Governments throughout the Muslim world strongly oppose Jihadi ideology and clerics in the state system generally adapt their views accordingly. However, poorly-networked clerics face limited options for advancement within the state institutions, so they often seek careers outside the system by appealing directly to lay Muslims for support. Many lay constituencies prefer clerics that are theologically independent, so some clerics adopt Jihadi ideology as a costly, credible signal of their commitment to doctrinal integrity.
There is a more systematic literature on Jihadi radicalization, but it focuses on radicalization of lay Muslims. The clearest account of radicalization among lay Muslims is a general process described by Wiktorowicz (2005b) and Sageman (2004). First, relatively non-religious lay Muslims face some type of shock or societal alienation that induces frustration and leads to “cognitive opening” in which individuals seek new frames for understanding the world. During this period, individuals may turn to Islam for answers and support; individuals with social ties to extremists may be pulled toward radical versions of Islam. Once introduced, some individuals become convinced that an extremist cleric or group offers the most authentic and legitimate source of Islamic interpretation. With this credibility established, the extremist indoctrinates individuals to believe that militant Jihad is an essential religious duty that will help them achieve the salvation prioritized by their newfound religious conviction.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, lay Muslims who are less religious are more susceptible to Jihadi radicalization than Muslims who are deeply embedded in their faith. In a comparison of joiners and non-joiners of a Britain-based extremist group, Wiktorowicz (2005b) finds that “most al-Muhajiroun activists were irreligious prior to their seeking and involvement in the movement” and “were unlikely to have adopted a religious identity” (102). In comparison, non-joiners “view themselves first and foremost as Muslims” (102-103). This lack of identification with or knowledge about Islam makes individuals susceptible to radicalization for several interrelated reasons. Low levels of religious knowledge mean that individuals are less equipped to discriminate between moderate and extreme versions of Islam. Simultaneously, individuals with little religious knowledge that nevertheless turn to Islam are more easily influenced by religious elites with expert knowledge. When this religious elite espouses radical views, these are likely to be passed on to followers.
Socialization: Both Sageman (2004) and Wiktorowicz (2005b) highlight the role of teachers who indoctrinate and socialize lay Muslims on the path to radicalization, and similar socialization effects may also shape the ideologies of clerics. Family is generally the first source of socially acquired information about Islam, but for most clerics, their sense of what constitutes legitimate Islamic practice is acquired outside the home at the hands of teachers. After their primary schooling, future clerics are typically enrolled in a religious secondary school where a significant portion of the day is spent in Quranic studies. Students that display aptitude will then enter specialized theological training, perhaps at one of the famous Islamic universities in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. It is at this point that clerics typically begin to mention the influence of specific mentors on their thinking. Because Islamic schooling instruction emphasizes memorization [The degree to which Islamic education prizes memorization can hardly be overstated. In June of 2011, I sat with a study circle of Al-Azhar students from the College of Shariah and Law as they tested each other on their word-for-word memorization of a 300-page 3rd-year textbook. See also Boyle (2004)], this training with senior clerics may be the first time that clerics-to-be are asked to think critically about theological and religious issues for themselves.
This system remains in place today, meaning that most clerics have to pursue careers within the state-run system of religious institutions. The state attempts — usually successfully — to ensure that clerics’ teachings and writings are acceptable to the state. Clerics that openly endorse Jihadi ideology are acting contrary to the state’s wishes and are often relieved of their appointments, arrested, and imprisoned (Lacroix, 2011; Brachman, 2009). This has the obvious result of discouraging Jihadi ideology among the vast majority of clerics who are trying to make a living while working their way through the ranks of the state system. Even the most respected and prestigious clerics have conceded to the demands of the state in order to maintain their careers. Abd alAzīz bin Bāz — the head cleric in Saudi Arabia — was widely seen as compromising Islamic legal principles for political expediency when he issued a fatwa authorizing the basing of US warplanes on Saudi soil during the 1991 Gulf War (Masud, Messick and Powers, 1996).
...No previous research has fully outlined this career-based theory of Jihadi ideology, but my arguments are supported by existing historical and ethnographic work. Zeghal (1999) hints that these motives may be behind expressions of radical Jihadi ideology as she traces the effects of the Egyptian regime’s attempts to coopt the clerics of Al-Azhar from the 1950s onward. As more moderate clerics followed the regime’s wishes and denounced violent Jihad, some clerics seem to have endorsed violent Jihad specifically to show that they were not puppet clerics of the state. Likewise, although the goal of Wiktorowicz (2005b) is to explain why lay Muslims choose to be radicalized by clerics, his interview evidence also illustrates the credibility that clerics can generate by adopting radical ideology. Wiktorowicz finds that Omar Bakri Muhammad, leader of the Muhajiroun in London, derives substantial credibility from his reputation for theological independence. It is wellknown that Omar is financially independent, a fact which he uses to criticize clerics who need funds from the Saudi regime to support themselves. It is also clear that his willingness to risk deportation or arrest by endorsing violence gives him added credibility. According to one of Wiktorowicz’s respondents, Omar “dares to say things that no one else does. Other religious leaders don’t do that. They don’t have the guts” (2005b, 144-145).
However, with 29,430 texts from 91 clerics, close reading of each is infeasible. Instead, I measure cleric ideology by applying supervised learning methods from the statistical machine learning literature (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, 2009) to the documents. Most of the previous work on measuring the ideology of political actors has used roll-call votes to estimate actor ideal points (Poole and Rosenthal, 1985; Martin and Quinn, 2002). This is not possible for Muslim clerics (because they do not vote on a common set of proposals), so instead, I directly scale the texts to estimate cleric support for militant Jihadi ideology.
My method uses two sets of training documents, one of which is assumed to be Jihadi and the other of which is assumed to be non-Jihadi. The Jihadi corpus consists of 765 texts of various genres that are available on Jihadi web forums as the “Mujahid’s bookbag”. These documents are specifically selected by Jihadis themselves as sources of spiritual instruction and advice, as well as mixed political and religious commentary.14 By using a set of known Jihadi documents as my training data, I avoid the difficult task of deciding which texts are most authentically “Jihadi”. Instead, I let Jihadis themselves identify the texts that are most representative of Jihadi ideology. Identifying a set of representative non-Jihadi texts is more difficult. While Jihadi ideology is focused and well defined, there are many types of non-Jihadi ideology, making it difficult to find a single set of texts that is representative of “non-Jihad.” Instead, I use a sample of 1,951 texts from the 91 clerics in the study as the baseline for non-Jihadi cleric writing. In fact, there are Jihadiwriters among these 91 clerics, but the center of gravity is decidedly not Jihadi. In practice, I find that using this group of texts as the “opposite” of the Mujahid’s bookbag produces accurate cleric scores. Treating these two groups of documents as having a known category, either Jihadi or non-Jihadi, I can then use them to classify other documents. Heuristically, my method is to calculate the word frequencies of a new document and then estimate the likelihood that the document is Jihadi by comparing its word frequencies to the training corpus. Documents that have word frequencies similar to Jihadi documents will have higher scores, while documents that have word frequencies less like Jihadi documents will have lower scores. Specifically, I follow Beauchamp (N.d.) in using a Naive Bayes classifier to calculate Jihad scores for each document.
http://i.imgur.com/TT4GKIA.png Figure 1: Relative frequency of terms in 765 Jihadi and 1,951 non-Jihadi documents. Red words are more frequent in Jihadi texts while blue words are more frequent in non-Jihadi texts. Font size indicates the overall frequency of each term in all training documents.
There are several plausible processes through which such a selection effect might occur, some of which cannot be effectively accounted for with the information available. It could be the case that Jihadi ideology is developed well before clerics begin to express it in their writings. It could be the case that future clerics who have already radicalized are less inclined to form connections with teachers, or choose less central teachers. Alternatively, teachers may choose not to take on students who show early signs of radicalization. I do not have measures of ideology independent of cleric writings, so it is difficult to say whether future Jihadi clerics might have shown early evidence radicalization that affected their network.
There could also be bias in the educational networks that clerics report in their biographies; perhaps Jihadis are equally connected to prominent clerics but choose not to report these connections because they do not burnish their Jihadi credentials. While it is difficult to be sure that such reporting bias does not exist, Jihadi clerics do have substantial respect for the scholarly status of the top establishment Salafis. Jihadis that report studying with them play up this credential in their biographies, suggesting that Jihadis who have prominent connections report them.
Finally, it is possible that Jihadi clerics share some personality trait that makes them less likely to connect with others and more likely to adopt the Manichean world-view of militant Jihad. Based on anecdotal accounts, it is not true that Jihadi ideologues are more inclined to be loners, lack social skills, or have unpleasant personalities; for example, Usama bin Laden was famously charismatic. However, it is currently impossible to systematically measure the personality traits of the 91 clerics in my study.
Complete memorization of the Quran is greatly respected and conveys substantial religious credibility so any cleric who is a ḥāfiẓ (having memorized the Quran) has every incentive to indicate this among their religious credentials. I assume that any cleric who does not mention having memorized the Quran has not; in my sample of 91 clerics, 37 percent mention memorizing the Quran.
I control for the covariates described above: cleric family, ḥāfiẓ status, religious primary school, master’s degree, doctoral degree, Western exposure, and GDP per capita of the cleric’s home country in the year of their birth. I also control for the average Jihad scores of each cleric’s teachers in some specifications, but this decreases the sample size from 91 to 51. I use logistic regression with robust standard errors. The key findings are presented in Figure 4. I find that clerics who are more central in the network are substantially less likely to adopt Jihadi ideology. chance of being Jihadist. If this same cleric instead has the maximum centrality observed in the network, the probability drops to two percent, a statistically significant 41 percentage point change. These results are almost identical if I use degree centrality instead of eigenvector centrality (see Models 3 and 4) or if I use cleric Jihad scores as a continuous outcome measure (not shown).
To put this finding in more concrete terms, I consider Ābū Baṣīr al-Ṭarṭūsī who has the highest Jihad score of the 91 clerics and has no connections in the network. The model predicts that he has a 50 percent chance of being Jihadist, given his covariates (meaning that roughly half of the clerics who fit his covariate profile will be Jihadist). However, when I simulate predictions for this same cleric while changing his centrality score from the 1st to the 75th percentile, the model now predicts that he would have only a 25 percent chance of being Jihadi. This change would move him from being one of the most outspoken advocates of Jihad to simply being a relatively conservative Salafi with few, if any, Jihadist leanings.
These findings are corroborated by evidence from interviews with students of al-Azhar University in Cairo. When asked how to become a cleric, one student responded, “It’s really all about trying to study with the prominent sheikhs and getting some kind of ijaza [certificate] from them if you can. You just try to get into people’s networks.” Then, speaking specifically of how one might go about promoted as a cleric in contemporary Egypt: “Being in Ali Gomaa’s crew [the current Grand Mufti of Egypt] is really the way to move up right now. That’s how you get appointed to teach, how you get a position in the Dar al-Ifta [Egyptian Fatwa Ministry], which gets you a nice car. He has lots of students, and he’ll often favor them in promotions and stuff. Of course, he is a good teacher so they are pretty solid.”18 In exchange for these promotions, clerics who are career appointees generally avoid commenting on topics that directly oppose the government. For example, as I sat in the study circle (halaqa) of Sheikh Āḥmad al-Riyān in the al-Azhar mosque of Cairo, a student asked for his opinion on the controversial visit of Sheikh Ali Gomaa’ on April 18th, 2012 to the al-Aqsa mosque. Gomaa’s visit violated a long-standing practice of not visiting the mosque as long as the territory is held by Israel. Other clerics, particularly Jihadists, had been quite vocal in their condemnation because they viewed the visit as legitimating Israel and undermining the Palestinian Jihad. But Sheikh al-Riyān is a career appointee at al-Azhar where he has taught since 1974 and enjoyed several promotions. In response to this sensitive question, Sheikh al-Riyān chuckled, paused, and replied, “I don’t like to speak about politics.”19
The biographies of Jihadi clerics repeatedly stress instances where a cleric’s unwillingness to make ideological compromises led to punishment by regime authorities. This credible demonstration of independence helps further these clerics careers by helping them appeal to lay Muslims who want independent clerics. I saw evidence of this support for imprisoned Jihadist clerics while attending Salafi demonstrations in downtown Cairo on April 26, 2012 following the banning of the Salafist presidential candidate. Although the protest was aimed at persuading the military government to step aside and allow the candidates to run freely, I spotted a sign supporting the release of Jihadi cleric Umar Abd al-Raḥman who is serving a life sentence in the US for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (see Figure 7). At the same time, I was having a discussion with a group of approximately 15 to 20 protesters who assured me that their movement was peaceful and did not support violent tactics to achieve political aims. This apparent contradiction highlights the possibility that Abd al-Raḥman’s advocacy of militant Jihad is primarily viewed as evidence that he is willing to speak truth to power. This buys him support among Salafis in Cairo, even those who are not particularly interested in the Jihadi cause that Abd al-Raḥman represents.
...Rather than being a symbol of theological independence, the prison time of these “reformed” clerics is a reminder that they ultimately gave up Jihadi ideology to appease political elites. I find evidence of this: the biographies of the three clerics do mention their arrests and imprisonment, but it is often mentioned obliquely as “the sheikh’s troubles.” While other Jihadi clerics who have been to jail mention this fact an average of eight times in their biographies (and some as many as 25 times), the three “reformed” clerics mention their prison time an average of only two times. This is evidence that clerics who are widely know to be co-opted by the state no longer try to use Jihadi ideology or the resulting prison time as signals of theological independence.
In the short term, it seems that democratic opening is making militant Islamist ideologies more mainstream, rather than sidelining them. However, my research suggests that this opening is likely to eventually undermine the sources of legitimacy upon which Jihadi clerics currently rely. Jihadi clerics survive in part because of the cooptation of the mainstream clerical elite by the governments of the Middle East. This cooptation fuels Jihadi ideology by provoking fears among certain types of lay Muslims that clerics who work for the regime cannot be trusted, making them more likely to listen to and support non-state clerics, such as Jihadis. The political opening in Egypt has undermined the control of the central government over the religious establishment. For the first time in a half century, the clerics of AlAzhar University are contemplating electing their head sheikh rather than accepting a government appointee."
"I argue that clerics strategically adopt or reject Jihadi ideology because of career incentives generated by the structure of cleric educational networks. Well-connected clerics enjoy substantial success at pursuing comfortable careers within state-run religious institutions and they reject Jihadi ideology in exchange for continued material support from the state. Clerics with poor educational networks cannot rely on connections to advance through the state-run institutions, so many pursue careers outside of the system by appealing directly to lay audiences for support. These clerics are more likely to adopt Jihadi ideology because it helps them demonstrate to potential supporters that they have not been theologically coopted by political elites. I provide evidence of these dynamics by collecting and analyzing 29,430 fatwas, articles, and books written by 91 contemporary clerics. Using statistical natural language processing, I measure the extent to which each cleric adopts Jihadi ideology in their writing. I combine this with biographical and network information about each cleric to trace the process by which poorly-connected clerics become more likely to adopt Jihadi ideology.
Most clerics support themselves by holding paid positions as Imams, teachers, bureaucrats, and advisors in the state-run systems of mosques, universities, and ministries of their respective countries. Governments throughout the Muslim world strongly oppose Jihadi ideology and clerics in the state system generally adapt their views accordingly. However, poorly-networked clerics face limited options for advancement within the state institutions, so they often seek careers outside the system by appealing directly to lay Muslims for support. Many lay constituencies prefer clerics that are theologically independent, so some clerics adopt Jihadi ideology as a costly, credible signal of their commitment to doctrinal integrity.
There is a more systematic literature on Jihadi radicalization, but it focuses on radicalization of lay Muslims. The clearest account of radicalization among lay Muslims is a general process described by Wiktorowicz (2005b) and Sageman (2004). First, relatively non-religious lay Muslims face some type of shock or societal alienation that induces frustration and leads to “cognitive opening” in which individuals seek new frames for understanding the world. During this period, individuals may turn to Islam for answers and support; individuals with social ties to extremists may be pulled toward radical versions of Islam. Once introduced, some individuals become convinced that an extremist cleric or group offers the most authentic and legitimate source of Islamic interpretation. With this credibility established, the extremist indoctrinates individuals to believe that militant Jihad is an essential religious duty that will help them achieve the salvation prioritized by their newfound religious conviction.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, lay Muslims who are less religious are more susceptible to Jihadi radicalization than Muslims who are deeply embedded in their faith. In a comparison of joiners and non-joiners of a Britain-based extremist group, Wiktorowicz (2005b) finds that “most al-Muhajiroun activists were irreligious prior to their seeking and involvement in the movement” and “were unlikely to have adopted a religious identity” (102). In comparison, non-joiners “view themselves first and foremost as Muslims” (102-103). This lack of identification with or knowledge about Islam makes individuals susceptible to radicalization for several interrelated reasons. Low levels of religious knowledge mean that individuals are less equipped to discriminate between moderate and extreme versions of Islam. Simultaneously, individuals with little religious knowledge that nevertheless turn to Islam are more easily influenced by religious elites with expert knowledge. When this religious elite espouses radical views, these are likely to be passed on to followers.
Socialization: Both Sageman (2004) and Wiktorowicz (2005b) highlight the role of teachers who indoctrinate and socialize lay Muslims on the path to radicalization, and similar socialization effects may also shape the ideologies of clerics. Family is generally the first source of socially acquired information about Islam, but for most clerics, their sense of what constitutes legitimate Islamic practice is acquired outside the home at the hands of teachers. After their primary schooling, future clerics are typically enrolled in a religious secondary school where a significant portion of the day is spent in Quranic studies. Students that display aptitude will then enter specialized theological training, perhaps at one of the famous Islamic universities in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. It is at this point that clerics typically begin to mention the influence of specific mentors on their thinking. Because Islamic schooling instruction emphasizes memorization [The degree to which Islamic education prizes memorization can hardly be overstated. In June of 2011, I sat with a study circle of Al-Azhar students from the College of Shariah and Law as they tested each other on their word-for-word memorization of a 300-page 3rd-year textbook. See also Boyle (2004)], this training with senior clerics may be the first time that clerics-to-be are asked to think critically about theological and religious issues for themselves.
This system remains in place today, meaning that most clerics have to pursue careers within the state-run system of religious institutions. The state attempts — usually successfully — to ensure that clerics’ teachings and writings are acceptable to the state. Clerics that openly endorse Jihadi ideology are acting contrary to the state’s wishes and are often relieved of their appointments, arrested, and imprisoned (Lacroix, 2011; Brachman, 2009). This has the obvious result of discouraging Jihadi ideology among the vast majority of clerics who are trying to make a living while working their way through the ranks of the state system. Even the most respected and prestigious clerics have conceded to the demands of the state in order to maintain their careers. Abd alAzīz bin Bāz — the head cleric in Saudi Arabia — was widely seen as compromising Islamic legal principles for political expediency when he issued a fatwa authorizing the basing of US warplanes on Saudi soil during the 1991 Gulf War (Masud, Messick and Powers, 1996).
...No previous research has fully outlined this career-based theory of Jihadi ideology, but my arguments are supported by existing historical and ethnographic work. Zeghal (1999) hints that these motives may be behind expressions of radical Jihadi ideology as she traces the effects of the Egyptian regime’s attempts to coopt the clerics of Al-Azhar from the 1950s onward. As more moderate clerics followed the regime’s wishes and denounced violent Jihad, some clerics seem to have endorsed violent Jihad specifically to show that they were not puppet clerics of the state. Likewise, although the goal of Wiktorowicz (2005b) is to explain why lay Muslims choose to be radicalized by clerics, his interview evidence also illustrates the credibility that clerics can generate by adopting radical ideology. Wiktorowicz finds that Omar Bakri Muhammad, leader of the Muhajiroun in London, derives substantial credibility from his reputation for theological independence. It is wellknown that Omar is financially independent, a fact which he uses to criticize clerics who need funds from the Saudi regime to support themselves. It is also clear that his willingness to risk deportation or arrest by endorsing violence gives him added credibility. According to one of Wiktorowicz’s respondents, Omar “dares to say things that no one else does. Other religious leaders don’t do that. They don’t have the guts” (2005b, 144-145).
However, with 29,430 texts from 91 clerics, close reading of each is infeasible. Instead, I measure cleric ideology by applying supervised learning methods from the statistical machine learning literature (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, 2009) to the documents. Most of the previous work on measuring the ideology of political actors has used roll-call votes to estimate actor ideal points (Poole and Rosenthal, 1985; Martin and Quinn, 2002). This is not possible for Muslim clerics (because they do not vote on a common set of proposals), so instead, I directly scale the texts to estimate cleric support for militant Jihadi ideology.
My method uses two sets of training documents, one of which is assumed to be Jihadi and the other of which is assumed to be non-Jihadi. The Jihadi corpus consists of 765 texts of various genres that are available on Jihadi web forums as the “Mujahid’s bookbag”. These documents are specifically selected by Jihadis themselves as sources of spiritual instruction and advice, as well as mixed political and religious commentary.14 By using a set of known Jihadi documents as my training data, I avoid the difficult task of deciding which texts are most authentically “Jihadi”. Instead, I let Jihadis themselves identify the texts that are most representative of Jihadi ideology. Identifying a set of representative non-Jihadi texts is more difficult. While Jihadi ideology is focused and well defined, there are many types of non-Jihadi ideology, making it difficult to find a single set of texts that is representative of “non-Jihad.” Instead, I use a sample of 1,951 texts from the 91 clerics in the study as the baseline for non-Jihadi cleric writing. In fact, there are Jihadiwriters among these 91 clerics, but the center of gravity is decidedly not Jihadi. In practice, I find that using this group of texts as the “opposite” of the Mujahid’s bookbag produces accurate cleric scores. Treating these two groups of documents as having a known category, either Jihadi or non-Jihadi, I can then use them to classify other documents. Heuristically, my method is to calculate the word frequencies of a new document and then estimate the likelihood that the document is Jihadi by comparing its word frequencies to the training corpus. Documents that have word frequencies similar to Jihadi documents will have higher scores, while documents that have word frequencies less like Jihadi documents will have lower scores. Specifically, I follow Beauchamp (N.d.) in using a Naive Bayes classifier to calculate Jihad scores for each document.
http://i.imgur.com/TT4GKIA.png Figure 1: Relative frequency of terms in 765 Jihadi and 1,951 non-Jihadi documents. Red words are more frequent in Jihadi texts while blue words are more frequent in non-Jihadi texts. Font size indicates the overall frequency of each term in all training documents.
There are several plausible processes through which such a selection effect might occur, some of which cannot be effectively accounted for with the information available. It could be the case that Jihadi ideology is developed well before clerics begin to express it in their writings. It could be the case that future clerics who have already radicalized are less inclined to form connections with teachers, or choose less central teachers. Alternatively, teachers may choose not to take on students who show early signs of radicalization. I do not have measures of ideology independent of cleric writings, so it is difficult to say whether future Jihadi clerics might have shown early evidence radicalization that affected their network.
There could also be bias in the educational networks that clerics report in their biographies; perhaps Jihadis are equally connected to prominent clerics but choose not to report these connections because they do not burnish their Jihadi credentials. While it is difficult to be sure that such reporting bias does not exist, Jihadi clerics do have substantial respect for the scholarly status of the top establishment Salafis. Jihadis that report studying with them play up this credential in their biographies, suggesting that Jihadis who have prominent connections report them.
Finally, it is possible that Jihadi clerics share some personality trait that makes them less likely to connect with others and more likely to adopt the Manichean world-view of militant Jihad. Based on anecdotal accounts, it is not true that Jihadi ideologues are more inclined to be loners, lack social skills, or have unpleasant personalities; for example, Usama bin Laden was famously charismatic. However, it is currently impossible to systematically measure the personality traits of the 91 clerics in my study.
Complete memorization of the Quran is greatly respected and conveys substantial religious credibility so any cleric who is a ḥāfiẓ (having memorized the Quran) has every incentive to indicate this among their religious credentials. I assume that any cleric who does not mention having memorized the Quran has not; in my sample of 91 clerics, 37 percent mention memorizing the Quran.
I control for the covariates described above: cleric family, ḥāfiẓ status, religious primary school, master’s degree, doctoral degree, Western exposure, and GDP per capita of the cleric’s home country in the year of their birth. I also control for the average Jihad scores of each cleric’s teachers in some specifications, but this decreases the sample size from 91 to 51. I use logistic regression with robust standard errors. The key findings are presented in Figure 4. I find that clerics who are more central in the network are substantially less likely to adopt Jihadi ideology. chance of being Jihadist. If this same cleric instead has the maximum centrality observed in the network, the probability drops to two percent, a statistically significant 41 percentage point change. These results are almost identical if I use degree centrality instead of eigenvector centrality (see Models 3 and 4) or if I use cleric Jihad scores as a continuous outcome measure (not shown).
To put this finding in more concrete terms, I consider Ābū Baṣīr al-Ṭarṭūsī who has the highest Jihad score of the 91 clerics and has no connections in the network. The model predicts that he has a 50 percent chance of being Jihadist, given his covariates (meaning that roughly half of the clerics who fit his covariate profile will be Jihadist). However, when I simulate predictions for this same cleric while changing his centrality score from the 1st to the 75th percentile, the model now predicts that he would have only a 25 percent chance of being Jihadi. This change would move him from being one of the most outspoken advocates of Jihad to simply being a relatively conservative Salafi with few, if any, Jihadist leanings.
These findings are corroborated by evidence from interviews with students of al-Azhar University in Cairo. When asked how to become a cleric, one student responded, “It’s really all about trying to study with the prominent sheikhs and getting some kind of ijaza [certificate] from them if you can. You just try to get into people’s networks.” Then, speaking specifically of how one might go about promoted as a cleric in contemporary Egypt: “Being in Ali Gomaa’s crew [the current Grand Mufti of Egypt] is really the way to move up right now. That’s how you get appointed to teach, how you get a position in the Dar al-Ifta [Egyptian Fatwa Ministry], which gets you a nice car. He has lots of students, and he’ll often favor them in promotions and stuff. Of course, he is a good teacher so they are pretty solid.”18 In exchange for these promotions, clerics who are career appointees generally avoid commenting on topics that directly oppose the government. For example, as I sat in the study circle (halaqa) of Sheikh Āḥmad al-Riyān in the al-Azhar mosque of Cairo, a student asked for his opinion on the controversial visit of Sheikh Ali Gomaa’ on April 18th, 2012 to the al-Aqsa mosque. Gomaa’s visit violated a long-standing practice of not visiting the mosque as long as the territory is held by Israel. Other clerics, particularly Jihadists, had been quite vocal in their condemnation because they viewed the visit as legitimating Israel and undermining the Palestinian Jihad. But Sheikh al-Riyān is a career appointee at al-Azhar where he has taught since 1974 and enjoyed several promotions. In response to this sensitive question, Sheikh al-Riyān chuckled, paused, and replied, “I don’t like to speak about politics.”19
The biographies of Jihadi clerics repeatedly stress instances where a cleric’s unwillingness to make ideological compromises led to punishment by regime authorities. This credible demonstration of independence helps further these clerics careers by helping them appeal to lay Muslims who want independent clerics. I saw evidence of this support for imprisoned Jihadist clerics while attending Salafi demonstrations in downtown Cairo on April 26, 2012 following the banning of the Salafist presidential candidate. Although the protest was aimed at persuading the military government to step aside and allow the candidates to run freely, I spotted a sign supporting the release of Jihadi cleric Umar Abd al-Raḥman who is serving a life sentence in the US for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (see Figure 7). At the same time, I was having a discussion with a group of approximately 15 to 20 protesters who assured me that their movement was peaceful and did not support violent tactics to achieve political aims. This apparent contradiction highlights the possibility that Abd al-Raḥman’s advocacy of militant Jihad is primarily viewed as evidence that he is willing to speak truth to power. This buys him support among Salafis in Cairo, even those who are not particularly interested in the Jihadi cause that Abd al-Raḥman represents.
...Rather than being a symbol of theological independence, the prison time of these “reformed” clerics is a reminder that they ultimately gave up Jihadi ideology to appease political elites. I find evidence of this: the biographies of the three clerics do mention their arrests and imprisonment, but it is often mentioned obliquely as “the sheikh’s troubles.” While other Jihadi clerics who have been to jail mention this fact an average of eight times in their biographies (and some as many as 25 times), the three “reformed” clerics mention their prison time an average of only two times. This is evidence that clerics who are widely know to be co-opted by the state no longer try to use Jihadi ideology or the resulting prison time as signals of theological independence.
In the short term, it seems that democratic opening is making militant Islamist ideologies more mainstream, rather than sidelining them. However, my research suggests that this opening is likely to eventually undermine the sources of legitimacy upon which Jihadi clerics currently rely. Jihadi clerics survive in part because of the cooptation of the mainstream clerical elite by the governments of the Middle East. This cooptation fuels Jihadi ideology by provoking fears among certain types of lay Muslims that clerics who work for the regime cannot be trusted, making them more likely to listen to and support non-state clerics, such as Jihadis. The political opening in Egypt has undermined the control of the central government over the religious establishment. For the first time in a half century, the clerics of AlAzhar University are contemplating electing their head sheikh rather than accepting a government appointee."