Piety and Public Opinion
Understanding Indonesian Islam
Thomas B. Pepinsky, R. William Liddle, and Saiful Mujani
Reviews and Awards
"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
"The authors produce a thoughtful, rigorous examination of the connections between piety and politics in one society." --L. J. Alderink, emeritus, Concordia College, CHOICE
"The chapters will be a good reading material for students of religion and politics, sociology of religion and Indonesian Islam." -- Sirojuddin Arif, Northern Illinois University, newbooks.asia
