Mansoor Moaddel (PhD 1986, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is professor of sociology at University of Maryland, College Park. His many books include Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse (2005) and Values, Political Action, and Change in the Middle East and the Arab Spring (2017).
He studies religion, ideology, political conflict, revolution, and social change. His work addresses the causes and consequences of human values. He has carried out values surveys in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey. His latest survey project focused on a cross-national comparative analysis of religious fundamentalism in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey. He is currently engaged in a comparative cross-national panel survey in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey in order to understand the dynamics of change in values and political engagements.
His previous empirical research project was a comparative historical analysis of ideological production in the Islamic world in which he studied Islamic modernism in Egypt, India, and Iran between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth; liberal nationalism in Egypt, anti-clerical secularism in Iran, liberal Arabism and pan-Arab nationalism in Syria and Iraq in the first half of the twentieth century; and Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Syria in the second half. Moaddel’s teaching interests are in the areas of values survey, sociology of ideology, sociology of religion, political conflict and revolution, terrorism and political violence, religion and politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and statistics.
