PRINCETON, N.J. – On the streets of the Arab world, Amaney Jamal, a Princeton University politics professor, asks questions that can get her put under surveillance, kicked out of the country, thrown in jail or worse.
At 37, she is among a new crop of academics who see their mission as helping the Western world understand the views of Muslims.
Jamal's specialty is sampling the opinions of Muslims to get a taste of ordinary life and the big political and religious issues. It can be risky work.
She found out just how much one summer day in 2005, when the phone rang in her apartment south of Amman, Jordan. Two of her research assistants had just been jailed on suspicion they were with the CIA.
“I'm sitting here in an apartment full of transcripts,” recalls Jamal, a mother of four. “My kids are with me also. The logical thing to think is, 'If I can't get these people out, they're going to come pick me up.' ”
In the retelling, there's excitement in her voice: “Immediately I hid the computers, scattered them around contacts we had established. I called up my contacts in Amman: 'You guys said I had security clearance! My researchers are in jail!' ”
Her assistants were freed six hours later, after playing tapes for their jailers – tapes in which, lucky for them, their interviewees had praised the police.
After the arrests, she didn't leave Jordan because she still had two weeks of work left to do on her quest to interview 250 Middle Easterners. She is almost certain she was under surveillance those two weeks.
People ask, “ 'Why don't we have more people studying the Middle East?' It's not an easy region to get into,” said Jamal, a California-born Muslim of Palestinian descent. “Here I am, a fluent Arabic speaker, I have relatives in the region, I wear hijab, and I observe, and I get accused of working for the CIA.”
Fieldwork on other Muslims is her bread and butter. She is a well-traveled speaker on American Muslim issues who has tutored the FBI on talking more effectively with Muslims.
These days, in her Princeton office, she is perusing transcripts of the interviews she and her research assistants did with the 250 Middle Easterners, interviews she hopes will help inform Westerners how ordinary Arabs really feel about democracy.
She showed a visitor some of the questions posed during 60-to-90-minute interviews in the streets of Jordan, Kuwait and Morocco in 2005, 2006 and 2007:
“Do you think the voices of the people are heard in your country?”
“Do you think Islam and democracy are compatible?”
Jamal and her colleagues believe that with the United States spending billions of dollars trying to reshape Arab governments, Americans must understand that these new Arab democracies may never look like Western ones.
For example, it's a widespread belief in Arab countries, Jamal said, that “church and state” need not be separate as in the United States. Proposing such a wall often gets a person labeled an enemy of Islam, she said. “Religion will play more of a role. Is that problematic? Can democracy be the impetus for attitudinal change? Perhaps.”
Back in the early 1990s, as the Cold War ended, Jamal said “democracy seemed to be breaking out around the world.” The problem, however, was that “a lot of the paradigms and models and theories that were being used to discuss democracy didn't necessarily apply to the Arab world or to the Middle East.”
