Associate Professor Richard Nielsen is an MIT political scientist with an innovative research program: He studies clerics in the Islamic world, combining textual analysis, ethnographic insights, on-the-ground research in the Middle East, and a big-data approach to charting online tracts. This method has generated novel conclusions about religious doctrine and authority — although Nielsen, who has graduate degrees in both government and statistics and does his primary research in Arabic, downplays his versatility. “I basically tell people that I’m not the best in the world at any of the things…
