Overview

Across the Muslim world, religion plays an increasingly prominent role in both the private and public lives of over a billion people. Observers of these changes struggle to understand the consequences of an Islamic resurgence in a democratizing world. Will democratic political participation by an increasingly religious population lead to victories by Islamists at the ballot box? Will more conspicuously pious Muslims participate in politics and markets in a fundamentally different way than they had previously? Will a renewed attention to Islam lead Muslim democracies to reevaluate their place in the global community of states, turning away from alignments with the West or the Global South and towards an Islamic civilizational identity?The answers to all of these questions depend, at least in part, on what ordinary Muslims think and do. In order to provide these answers, the authors of this book look to Indonesia--the world's largest Muslim country and one of the world's only consolidated Muslim democracies. They draw on original public opinion data to explore how religiosity and religious belief translate into political and economic behavior at the individual level. Across various issue areas--support for democracy or Islamic law, partisan politics, Islamic finance, views about foreign engagement--they find no evidence that the religious orientations of Indonesian Muslims have any systematic relationships with their political preferences or economic behavior. The broad conclusion is that scholars of Islam, in Indonesia and elsewhere, must understand religious life and individual piety as part of a larger and more complex set of social transformations. These transformations include modernization, economic development, and globalization, each of which has occurred in parallel with Islamic revivalism throughout the world. Against the common assumption that piety would naturally inhibit any tendencies towards modernity, democracy, or cosmopolitanism, Piety and Public Opinion reveals the complex and subtle links between religion and political beliefs in a critically important Muslim democracy.

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9780190697808

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Reviews

In this book, the authors have usefully provided a methodological blueprint for survey research that is based on a nuanced understanding of religion and politics. It is a method that rejects the view of Muslims as caricatures who act according to religion alone and instead takes them to be complex subjects shaped by a myriad of religious and non-religious factors. Given the enormous influence that quantitative data have on the policies made by Western democracies, including policies that pertain to the Muslim world, the importance of this book's contribution cannot be overstated. * Nur Amali Ibrahim, Reading Religion *

This book does a great job laying out the ways in which piety shapes Indonesian views and orientations towards politics, markets, and the globe. The strength of the book is that it showcases contextual nuance to better illuminate the influence of Islam in Indonesian politics and society. The book relies on a remarkable amount of data and rigorous analyses. It is extremely well-researched. --Amaney A. Jamal, Princeton University In Piety and Public Opinion, three leading political scientists show that impressions can deceive; they find that Muslim identity generally fails to predict Indonesians' political and economic behavior. This book is a model of how problem-driven, data-rich political science can advance our understanding of pressing real-world issues. --M. Steven Fish, author of Are Muslims Distinctive? Piety and Public Opinion upends conventional thinking on the relationship between individual religiosity and public life among Muslims. Through an entirely original analysis of public opinion in Indonesia, the authors show us that personal piety counts much less than we would expect in critical areas of political, economic, and international engagement. The book makes a clarion call for deeper and more subtle thinking about how religious revivalism is reshaping the Islamic world. --Edward Aspinall, author of Islam and Nation Lucid, engaging, and tightly argued throughout, Piety and Public Opinion discredits the common misperception that support for political Islam, the use of Islamic financial services, and engagement with the Muslim world are all grounded in individual piety. Using rich survey data, the authors show that among Indonesian Muslims, these are actually determined by non-religious factors. The book's findings are relevant to the entire Muslim world and carry major implications for the study of how religion interacts with politics, economics, and social life. --Timur Kuran, Duke University

This book does a great job laying out the ways in which piety shapes Indonesian views and orientations towards politics, markets, and the globe. The strength of the book is that it showcases contextual nuance to better illuminate the influence of Islam in Indonesian politics and society. The book relies on a remarkable amount of data and rigorous analyses. It is extremely well-researched. --Amaney A. Jamal, Princeton University In Piety and Public Opinion, three leading political scientists show that impressions can deceive; they find that Muslim identity generally fails to predict Indonesians' political and economic behavior. This book is a model of how problem-driven, data-rich political science can advance our understanding of pressing real-world issues. --M. Steven Fish, author of Are Muslims Distinctive? Piety and Public Opinion upends conventional thinking on the relationship between individual religiosity and public life among Muslims. Through an entirely original analysis of public opinion in Indonesia, the authors show us that personal piety counts much less than we would expect in critical areas of political, economic, and international engagement. The book makes a clarion call for deeper and more subtle thinking about how religious revivalism is reshaping the Islamic world. --Edward Aspinall, author of Islam and Nation Lucid, engaging, and tightly argued throughout, Piety and Public Opinion discredits the common misperception that support for political Islam, the use of Islamic financial services, and engagement with the Muslim world are all grounded in individual piety. Using rich survey data, the authors show that among Indonesian Muslims, these are actually determined by non-religious factors. The book's findings are relevant to the entire Muslim world and carry major implications for the study of how religion interacts with politics, economics, and social life. --Timur Kuran, Duke University

Author Information

Thomas B. Pepinsky is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University. R. William Liddle is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Ohio State University. Saiful Mujani is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta, Indonesia.

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