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The Lonely Jihadist: Weak Networks and the Radicalization of Muslim Clerics

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The Lonely Jihadist: Weak Networks and the Radicalization of Muslim Clerics The Lonely Jihadist: Weak Networks and the Radicalization of Muslim Clerics The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Nielsen, Richard Alexander. 2013. The Lonely Jihadist: Weak Networks and the Radicalization of Muslim Clerics. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11124850 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Lonely Jihadist: Weak Networks and the Radicalization of Muslim Clerics A dissertation presented by Richard Alexander Nielsen to the Department of Government in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Political Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2013 ©2013 – Richard A. Nielsen All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Beth A. Simmons Richard A. Nielsen The Lonely Jihadist: Weak Networks and the Radicalization of Muslim Clerics Abstract This dissertation explores why some Muslim clerics adopt the ideology of militant Ji- had while others do not. 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 sup- port 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 27,142 fatwas, articles, and books written by 101 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. iii Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Contours of Jihadist Ideology 15 2.1 Historical Background .............................. 16 2.2 Jihadi Ideology .................................. 18 2.3 Justifying Jihadi Violence ............................ 28 2.4 Debates About Jihadi Ideology ......................... 30 2.5 Jihadi Rhetoric .................................. 34 2.6 Does Cleric Ideology Matter? .......................... 47 2.7 Conclusion ..................................... 52 3 Networks, Career Paths, and Cleric Radicalization 54 3.1 The Historical Sources of the “Jihadi Moment” ................ 57 3.2 Network Structure, Career Paths, and Radicalization ............. 60 3.2.1 Cleric Motivations ............................ 62 3.2.2 Educational Networks .......................... 64 3.2.3 Insider and Outsider Career Paths ................... 71 3.2.4 Career Paths and Ideology ........................ 78 3.3 Related Arguments and Alternative Explanations ............... 81 3.4 Conclusion ..................................... 86 4 Measuring Jihadi Ideology 88 4.1 A Data Set of Clerics ............................... 88 4.2 Texts ........................................ 97 4.3 A Model ...................................... 105 4.4 Validation ..................................... 120 4.4.1 Comparison to Jihadist Assessments .................. 120 4.4.2 Comparison to Scholarly Assessments .................. 130 4.5 Conclusion ..................................... 133 iv 5 Testing Theories of Cleric Radicalization 134 5.1 Cleric Biographies ................................ 135 5.2 Coding Biographical Information About Clerics ................ 140 5.3 Findings ...................................... 156 5.3.1 Bivariate Correlation ........................... 156 5.3.2 Regression Analysis ........................... 160 5.3.3 Extensions ................................ 168 5.4 Conclusion ..................................... 178 6 Conclusion 180 6.1 Contributions ................................... 181 6.2 Policy ....................................... 185 Bibliography 187 v List of Tables 2.1 Top Words for Five Topics in a Jihadi Corpus. ................. 39 2.2 Texts that are Representative of Five Topics in Jihadi Rhetoric ....... 40 4.1 The Process of Stemming for Text Classification ................ 113 vi List of Figures 2.1 Proportions of Topic Use in a Jihadi Corpus by Author ............ 46 3.1 Theory Flowchart. ................................ 61 4.1 A Comparison with Clerics in the Secondary Literature ............ 93 4.2 The Topics of a Large Fatwa Corpus ...................... 100 4.3 Proportion of Words from Fatwas for each Cleric ............... 104 4.4 A Word Cloud Representation of the Jihad Score Model ........... 111 4.5 Jihad Scores for Clerics with Benchmarking Texts ............... 114 4.6 Word Contributions to a Document’s Jihad Score ............... 118 4.7 An Example of Classification Error ....................... 119 4.8 Jihad Scores Predict Biographies that Identify Jihadists ............ 121 4.9 Jihad Scores Predict Inclusion in The Exoneration ............... 123 4.10 Jihad Scores Predict Inclusion in Minbar al-Tawḥīd wal-Jiḥād ........ 125 4.11 Jihadist Image: Scholars of Falsehood ...................... 127 4.12 Jihad Scores Predict Cleric Assessments by the Islamic Thinkers Society Website129 4.13 Jihad Scores Predict Brachman’s Categorization of Salafis .......... 131 4.14 Jihad Scores Predict Expert Codings in the Militant Ideology Atlas ..... 132 5.1 The Amount of Cleric Biographical Information. ................ 139 5.2 An Educational Network of Clerics ....................... 145 5.3 The Distribution of the Count of State-funded Positions. ........... 147 5.4 Higher Education Attainment and Year of Birth. ............... 149 5.5 Correlation Between Networks, Insider Appointments, and Jihad Scores ... 157 5.6 Educational Networks of Jihadists and non-Jihadists ............. 158 5.7 Percentage of Jihadi Clerics by Network Centrality and Career Path .... 159 5.8 Regression Models Predicting Jihad Scores ................... 162 5.9 Regression Models Predicting Insider Appointments .............. 166 5.10 Regression Models Predicting Jihad Scores, Conditioning on Insider Appoint- ments ....................................... 167 vii 5.11 Average Treatment Effects with Alternative Cut-offs for Defining Treatment and Control .................................... 171 5.12 A Scatterplot of Jihad Scores and Cleric Imprisonment ............ 174 5.13 A Regression Model Predicting Cleric Imprisonment .............. 176 5.14 Support for Jihadist Umar Abd al-Rahman .................. 177 viii Acknowledgments It is impossible to adequately acknowledge those who have made my research possible. I owe particular thanks to a number of institutional sources of support. The National Science Foundation has supported this project twice: first through a Graduate Research Fellowship that provided me with stipendiary support for three years of graduate school, and again through a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant in the final stages of completion. Without these resources, my time in graduate school would have been substantially more difficult and this project would have been impossible. I am fully cognizant that this represents a substantial investment in my early career by the taxpayers of the United States; I hope that my work is of sufficient importance to merit this trust. I also received funding from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, both at Harvard University. My final year was spent as a predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, where I deeply enjoyed the intellectual environment and support. My time in graduate school has been greatly enriched by my graduate student colleagues in the Department of Government at Harvard. Brandon Stewart, Yuri Zhukov, Jeff Friedman, and Iain Osgood were a crucial brain-trust. I benefited immensely from conversations with Jane Vaynman, Chiara Superti, Justin Grimmer, Tyson Belanger, Omar Wasow, Andrew Coe, Matt Blackwell, Maya Sen, Jonathan Bischof, Evann Smith, and Amy Catalinac. A number of others have commented on iterations of this project. Besides those listed above, I very much appreciate thoughtful engagement by Ashley Anderson, Rob Blair, Lisa Blaydes, Jocelyne Cesari, Jeffry Frieden, Scott Gehlbach, Justin Gest, Noam Gidron, Josh Gubler, Brian Haggerty, Peter Hall, Thomas Hegghammer, Nahomi Ichino, Baber Jo- hansen, Iain Johnston, Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, Danial Lashkari, Peter McMurray, Pascal Minoret, Harris Mylonas, Rebecca Nielsen, David Patel, Molly Roberts, Ari Schriber, Jil- lian Schwedler, Prerna Singh, Arthur Spirling, Dustin Tingley, Malika Zeghal, and Daniel Ziblatt. William Granara rekindled my passion for Arabic and was a steady supporter of my work. Don Rubin was a fabulous mentor in during my time in the Harvard Statistics Department. To those who I have failed to list, be
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