Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad

Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

by Richard A. Nielsen

Deadly Clerics explains why some Muslim clerics adopt the ideology of militant jihadism while most do not. The book explores multiple pathways of cleric radicalization and shows that the interplay of academic, religious, and political institutions has influenced the rise of modern jihadism through a mechanism of blocked ambition. As long as clerics' academic ambitions remain attainable, they are unlikely to espouse violent jihad. Clerics who are forced out of academia are more likely to turn to jihad for two jihadist ideas are attractive to those who see the system as turning against them, and preaching a jihad ideology can help these outsider clerics attract supporters and funds. The book draws on evidence from various sources, including large-scale statistical analysis of texts and network data obtained from the Internet, case studies of clerics' lives, and ethnographic participant observations at sites in Cairo, Egypt.

Genres: Nonfiction

254 pages, Hardcover

Published November 9, 2017

Reviews

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important work of political science that puts forth a novel theory about how some muslim clerics become radical jihadists. His core argument is that "blocked ambition - the inability of an actor to achieve a substantial, deeply held goal - nudges clerics toward jihadism."

The book does a good job of grounding cutting edge quantitative methods with ethnographic qualitative methods that repeatedly took the author to the great Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo. With even a limited immersion within the milieu of Islamic jurisprudence, he's able to write with greater insight and persuasiveness.

[Daniel Hadley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compelling evidence from a uniquely sourced dataset, as well as field work in Cairo, that some jihadists clerics probably ended up radicalizing for a simple reason: denied tenure. This may sound intuitive, but Nielsen's statistical analysis of clerical texts and academic networks paints a vibrant picture of both how this could happen, and what evidence we see for a causal link (rather than a simple correlation between academic failure and radicalization). The methods are cutting edge, the graphs are clear and information dense, and the prose is as clean and compelling as the visualizations. What may be overlooked by readers is how difficult it must have been to collect this data. Scraping text is laborious, requiring frequent bug fixes and updates. But the results here appear to have made the efforts worthwhile.