Description

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In Religious Fundamentalism in the Middle East, Moaddel and Karabenick analyze fundamentalist beliefs and attitudes across nations (Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia), faith (Christianity and Islam), and ethnicity (Azari-Turks, Kurds, and Persians among Iranians), using comparative survey data. For them, fundamentalism is not just a set of religious beliefs. It is rather a set of beliefs about and attitudes toward whatever religious beliefs one has. In this analysis, the authors show that fundamentalist beliefs and attitudes vary across national contexts and individual characteristics, and predict people's orientation toward the same set of historical issues that were the concerns of fundamentalist intellectual leaders and activists. The authors' analysis reveals a "cycle of spirituality" that reinforces the critical importance of taking historical and cultural contexts into consideration to understand the role of religious fundamentalism in contemporary Middle Eastern societies.

About the Author

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Mansoor Moaddel, Ph.D. (1986), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University. He has published several books and many articles on revolution, religion and ideology, including Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse (The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Stuart A. Karabenick, Ph.D. (1967), University of Michigan, is Research Professor in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan. He has published numerous articles and books on a variety of topics that include personal epistemological beliefs in the Middle East, students' perceptions of classroom goal structures, student and teacher responsibility, and the role of help and information seeking in educational contexts.