Much of the Middle East and North Africa still appears to be in a transitional period set in motion by the 2011 Arab uprisings, and the political trajectory of the region remains difficult to grasp. In The Clash of Values, Mansoor Moaddel provides groundbreaking empirical data to demonstrate how the collision between Islamic fundamentalism and liberal nationalism explains the region's present and will determine its future. Analyzing data from over 60,000 face-to-face interviews of nationally representative samples of people in seven countries-Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey-Moaddel reveals the depth and breadth of the conflict of values. He develops measures of expressive individualism, gender equality, secularism, and religious fundamentalism and shows that the factors that strengthen liberal values also weaken fundamentalism. Moaddel highlights longitudinal data showing changes in orientations toward secular politics, Western-type government, religious tolerance, national identity, and to a limited extent gender equality, as well as a significant decline in support for political Islam, over the past decade. Focusing on these trends, he contends that the Arab Spring represents a new phase of collective action rooted in the spread of the belief in individual liberty. Offering a rigorous and deeply researched perspective on social change, The Clash of Values disentangles the Middle East and North Africa's political complexity and pinpoints a crucial trend toward liberal nationalism.

Much of the Middle East and North Africa still appears to be in a transitional period set in motion by the 2011 Arab uprisings, and the political trajectory of the region remains difficult to grasp. In The Clash of Values, Mansoor Moaddel provides groundbreaking empirical data to demonstrate how the collision between Islamic fundamentalism and liberal nationalism explains the region's present and will determine its future. Analyzing data from over 60,000 face-to-face interviews of nationally representative samples of people in seven countries-Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey-Moaddel reveals the depth and breadth of the conflict of values. He develops measures of expressive individualism, gender equality, secularism, and religious fundamentalism and shows that the factors that strengthen liberal values also weaken fundamentalism. Moaddel highlights longitudinal data showing changes in orientations toward secular politics, Western-type government, religious tolerance, national identity, and to a limited extent gender equality, as well as a significant decline in support for political Islam, over the past decade. Focusing on these trends, he contends that the Arab Spring represents a new phase of collective action rooted in the spread of the belief in individual liberty. Offering a rigorous and deeply researched perspective on social change, The Clash of Values disentangles the Middle East and North Africa's political complexity and pinpoints a crucial trend toward liberal nationalism.

Although many have tried, the spontaneity of the Arab Spring uprisings and the unpredictability of its diverse geographical outcomes have resisted explanation. For social scientists, part of the challenge has been how to effectively measure and analyze the empirical data, while another obstacle has been a lack of attention to the worldviews, value orientations, and long-term concerns from the people of the Middle East and North Africa. In order to meet these challenges head-on, Mansoor Moaddel and Michele J. Gelfand have assembled an international team of experts to explore and employ a new and diverse set of frameworks in order to explain the dynamics of cross-national variation, values, political engagement, morality, and development in these regions. To this end, the authors address a wide range of questions, such as: To what extent do recent events reflect changes in values among the Middle Eastern publics? Are youth uniformly more supportive of change than the rest of the population? To what extent are changes in values connected to changes in identities? How do we explain the process of change in the long term? As Moaddel and Gelfand remark in their book's introduction, "Our hope is that this collective effort will not only contribute to the development of the social sciences in the Middle East and North Africa, but also to practical political actions and public policies that serve social tolerance and harmony, peace, and economic prosperity for the people of the region."

A common weakness of many current dominant theories of revolution, argues author Mansoor Moaddel, is their exclusion of the role of ideology. He examines the Iranian revolution, highlighting class politics and contention for power within the context of changing the ideological relation between the state and civil society. In Moaddel's analytical framework, class politics and the state's action play crucial roles in the genesis of the Iranian Revolution. The state-patterned class conflict defined the identity of the opposition and channeled oppositional activities through the medium of religion. The revolutionary crisis began when the social discontent was expressed in terms of Shi'i revolutionary discourse. Moaddel argues that Shi'i revolutionary ideology was produced by diverse ideologues to address the problems they faced in the post-coup (1953) period. In presenting his argument, Moaddel provides a new and useful interpretation of the revolution in Iran, characterizing the postrevolutionary political order as a Third-World variant of fascism.

In Religious Fundamentalism in the Middle East, Moaddel and Karabenick analyse fundamentalist beliefs and attitudes across nations (Egypt, Iran, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia), faith (Christianity, Islam) and ethnicity (Azari-Turks, Kurds and Persians among Iranians), using comparative survey data. 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.

The Islamic world has experienced extensive social changes in modern times--the decline of traditional order, the rise of new social classes, the formation of massive bureaucratic and military states, and the incorporation of its economies into the world capitalist structure. Yet despite these changes, a national consensus on even the most important principles of social organization--the form of government, the relationship between religion and politics, the status of women, national identity, and rule making--has yet to emerge. Instead, Islamic countries experienced a sequence of cultural episodes that were characterized by ideological debates, religious disputations, and political conflicts, each ending with a revolution or military coup.
An ambitious comparative historical analysis of ideological production in the Islamic world from the mid-1800s to the present, Mansoor Moaddel's" Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism" provides a unique perspective for understanding the social conditions of these discourses. Understanding how these discourses were produced is, for Moaddel, the key to understanding Middle Eastern history. Based on this premise, Moaddel unlocks for readers the historical process that started with Islamic modernism and ended with fundamentalism.