Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Seminar Series: Pooyan Tamimi Arab

Abstract

by Pooyan Tamimi Arab

Traditional surveying methods like face-to-face interviewing and telephone polling can lead to invalid results in authoritarian countries.

That’s why GAMAAN – the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran – researched the politically sensitive topic of declining religiosity in Iran with methods that guarantee respondents’ anonymity: online multiple chain-referral sampling combined with the mass spreading of surveys through nationwide popular VPN software.

Our aim was to extract uncensored data on Iranians’ views about their religiosity and their country’s theocratic political structure.

In this presentation, I will focus on the 2020 and 2022 results regarding the compulsory hijab and respondents’ views of the Islamic Republic as a political system, and discuss GAMAAN’s latest survey conducted in December 2022/January 2023 with the assistance of several satellite television channels.

Methodological considerations and the survey results themselves shed light on what the different demographic groups in Iran think about key political issues. 

About the speaker

Pooyan Tamimi Arab is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University and a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is the secretary of GAMAAN, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran.

About the seminar series

Each semester, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (IMES) welcomes a fantastic range of guest speakers, PhD students and colleagues from across the University to present an evening seminar on their research.

In the spring semester of the 2022 to 2023 academic year, the overall theme is 'Persian Narratives'.  Topics include Persian, Iranian, and Arabic folklore, literature, poetry, traditions, and political structures.

All seminars will be followed by a Q&A and wine reception.

How to join

Events are free and everyone is welcome.

No booking is required for this seminar.

Are you interested in studying with us?

We are the only university in Scotland to offer courses in the Muslim world's three main languages, placing Arabic, Persian and Turkish in the context of history, literature, culture, religion and politics, past and present.

Choose from a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, including PhD programmes.

Find out more about Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Edinburgh