c. 2008 Religion News Service

PRINCETON, N.J. _ On the streets of the Arab world, Amaney Jamal, a Princeton University politics professor, asks the kinds of 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 street-reporting academics who see their mission as helping the Western world better understand the views of Muslims here and overseas.

Jamal’s particular specialty is polling, sampling the opinions of everyday Muslims to get a taste of ordinary life and the big political and religious issues that matter most to them.

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.”

When not in the Middle East, Jamal is at work in Princeton’s politics department, surrounded by shelves of books on Arab politics and unfinished packages of Pepperidge Farm orange Milanos and Girl Scout cookies.

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?”

“Do you think government officials understand the needs of people?”

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. Nonetheless, she said a Muslim democracy is “absolutely” possible.

“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.”

Her first book, “Barriers to Democracy,” was released in April and argues that a common form of Western support in Mideast democracies _ millions of dollars funneled to civic associations _ is off the mark.

The reason? In these authoritarian societies, she wrote, civic associations are politically tied to national leaders in ways they are not in the West. Where associations like the YMCA in Princeton lack government ties, she said in an interview, similar associations in the West Bank have been aligned with the Palestinian Authority.

When Jamal is not zipping around the world, she’s often shuttling her four children to the mosque or basketball games. She’s a PTO member at her children’s Islamic day school and occasionally chaperones school trips.

She tries _ mostly with success _ to keep her professional and private lives separate. A few months ago, when one of her articles was published in Horizons, a popular American Muslim magazine, it was the first time many at her mosque realized what she did for a living.

“People in the mosque come up and say, `I didn’t know you’re a professor’ … At the mosque, I just want to be another member of the mosque. I don’t want people to treat me any different just because I’m a professor at Princeton.”

(Jeff Diamant writes for The Star Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

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