Download Free Language And Power In The Discourse Of An Islamist Thinker Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Language And Power In The Discourse Of An Islamist Thinker and write the review.

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Miscellaneous, grade: with honours, University Hassan II. Casablanca (the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences - Ain Chock), course: Language and Society, language: English, abstract: Language is not a mere means of communication; it is a form of "social practice" that reflects the ideology and the socio-political ambitions of the person or the social group using that language (Fairclough, 1989). This study aims at exploring the relationships between language and ideology and how such relationships are represented in the talk of an Islamist Egyptian thinker; the analysis of the latter's talk was done according to Fairclough's model of Critical Discourse Analysis (1989). Critical Discourse Analysis is defined by van Dijk as a linguistic discipline which studies the relationships between discourse and social power. More specifically, Critical Discourse Analysis describes and explains "how power abuse is enacted, reproduced or legitimized by the text and talk of dominant groups or institutions" (1996: 84). CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) aims at analyzing hegemonic and manipulative discourses in society to uncover the mechanisms that have made those discourses hegemonic and manipulative. The ultimate purpose of any CDA study is to unravel the underlying hidden agenda which is left implicit in the discourse and to criticize it. The data base of this study is 26 excerpts taken from the talk of an Egyptian Islamist thinker who has been invited to a religious TV talk show to give his opinions about secularism in the Arab World. The excerpts have been analyzed within the framework of CDA. More specifically, the excerpts have been analyzed at two major levels: the rhetorical level and the argumentative level. The analysis of the former has been done in terms of the rhetorical elements that construct the majority of discourses such as transitivity, modality, agency, nominalization, passivization, lexicali
Reading the Islamic City offers insights into the implications the practices of the Maliki school of Islamic law have for the inhabitants of the Islamic city, the madinah. The problematic term madinah fundamentally indicates a phenomenon of building, dwelling, and urban settlement patterns that evolved after the 7th century CE in the Maghrib (North Africa) and al-Andalusia (Spain). Madinah involves multiple contexts that have socio-religious functions and symbolic connotations related to the faith and practice of Islam, and can be viewed in terms of a number of critiques such as everyday lives, boundaries, utopias, and dystopias. The book considers Foucault's power/knowledge matrix as it applies to an erudite cadre of scholars and legal judgments in the realm of architecture and urbanism. It acknowledges the specificity of power/knowledge insofar as it provides a dominant framework to tackle property rights, custom, noise, privacy, and a host of other subjects. Scholars of urban studies, religion, history, and geography will greatly benefit from this vivid analysis of the relevance of the juridico-discursive practice of Maliki Law in a set of productive or formative discourses in the Islamic city.
This wide-ranging set of essays explores the multi-faceted relationship between Islam and democracy. Each essayist's unique viewpoint on contemporary Islam provides insight into Islamic political thought and its connection to Western democracy.
In The Politics of Islamic Law, Iza Hussin compares India, Malaya, and Egypt during the British colonial period in order to trace the making and transformation of the contemporary category of ‘Islamic law.’ She demonstrates that not only is Islamic law not the shari’ah, its present institutional forms, substantive content, symbolic vocabulary, and relationship to state and society—in short, its politics—are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter. Drawing on extensive archival work in English, Arabic, and Malay—from court records to colonial and local papers to private letters and visual material—Hussin offers a view of politics in the colonial period as an iterative series of negotiations between local and colonial powers in multiple locations. She shows how this resulted in a paradox, centralizing Islamic law at the same time that it limited its reach to family and ritual matters, and produced a transformation in the Muslim state, providing the frame within which Islam is articulated today, setting the agenda for ongoing legislation and policy, and defining the limits of change. Combining a genealogy of law with a political analysis of its institutional dynamics, this book offers an up-close look at the ways in which global transformations are realized at the local level.
This unique book analyzes the discourse of organizations affiliated with al-Qaeda. It interrogates the discourse of these extremist organizations, which publish their own newspapers. These publications, widely distributed to the local population, play a critical role in securing and maintaining public support for the militant organizations. The book examines how these organizations discursively construct the socio-political reality of their world, in the process defining the Self and the Other. The Self becomes umma, or the global Muslim community, while the Other becomes the West, including the United States, Israel, and India. This book presents an analysis of three historical moments—the assassination of al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, the controversial YouTube video Innocence of the Muslims, and the shooting of the Pakistani child activist and Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai. This analysis reveals the discursive strategies used by the militant organizations to create what Foucault calls regimes of truth and articulate identities of the Self and the Other. The first of its kind, this book provides an insight into the mind-set of extremists. It presents a picture of the world that extremists construct through their own discourse and explains how extremists try to win the hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims in order to expand their support base, seek donations, and find new recruits. Understanding extremist narratives and the ways they feed the broader militant discourse may yield more meaningful and effective strategies for the West to communicate with mainstream Muslims.
Religion, Language and Power shows that the language of ‘religion’ is far from neutral, and that the packaging and naming of what English speakers call ‘religious’ groups or identities is imbued with the play of power. Religious Studies has all too often served to amplify voices from other centers of power, whether scripturalist or otherwise normative and dominant. This book’s de-centering of English classifications goes beyond the remit of most postcolonial studies in that it explores the classifications used in a range of languages — including Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek and English — to achieve a comparative survey of the roles of language and power in the making of ‘religion’ . In contextualizing these uses of language, the ten contributors explore how labels are either imposed or emerge interactively through discursive struggles between dominant and marginal groups. In dealing with the interplay of religion, language and power, there is no other book with the breadth of this volume.
An important work of contemporary Islamic thought argues against the programmatic use of Islamic religious texts to support fundamentalist beliefs First published in Arabic in 1994, progressive Muslim scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd's controversial essay argued that conventional fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran and other Islamic religious texts are ahistorical and misleading. Conservative religious leaders accused him of apostasy. Marking the first time a work by Abu Zayd is available in its entirety in any Western language, this English edition makes his erudite interpretation of classical Islamic thought accessible to a wider audience at a critical historical moment.
The current agenda of international politics is full of headline-grabbing conflicts. This book focuses on one such conflict, namely the Kurdish question in Turkey, with recent peace negotiations between Turkey and the PKK having apparently failed. The pro-Islamic ruling party of Turkey (the AK Party) and the ideologically leftist pro-Kurdish parties are the key determinants of this conflict. Their historical development since the inception of modern Turkey is discussed here to demonstrate the similarities and differences between these oppositional social and political groups. In this sense, the book claims that ideological rigidity is one of the core factors shaping the relationship between these parties. As such, the book provides a detailed investigation of the ideological perspectives of the key actors in the conflict in order to gain a better understanding of why the last initiative ended negatively.
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously announced the "end of history." The Berlin Wall had fallen; liberal democracy had won out. But what of illiberal democracy--the idea that popular majorities, working through the democratic process, might reject gender equality, religious freedoms, and other norms that Western democracies take for granted? Nowhere have such considerations become more relevant than in the Middle East, where the uprisings of 2011 swept the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups to power. In Temptations of Power, Shadi Hamid draws on hundreds of interviews with leaders and activists from across the region to advance a new understanding of how Islamist movements change over time. He puts forward the bold thesis that repression "forced" Islamists to moderate their politics, work in coalitions, de-emphasize Islamic law, and set aside the dream of an Islamic state. Meanwhile, democratic openings in the 1980s--and again during the Arab Spring--pushed Islamists back toward their original conservatism. With the uprisings of 2011, Islamists found themselves in an enviable position, but one for which they were unprepared. Groups like the Brotherhood combine the features of both political parties and religious movements, leading to an inherent tension they have struggled to resolve. However pragmatic they may be, their ultimate goal remains the Islamization of society. When the electorate they represent is conservative as well, they can push their own form of illiberal democracy while insisting they are carrying out the popular will. This can lead to overreach and significant backlash. Yet, while the Egyptian coup and the subsequent crackdown were a devastating blow for the Islamist "project," obituaries of political Islam are premature. As long as the battle over the role of religion in public life continues, Islamist parties in countries as diverse as Egypt, Tunisia, and Jordan will remain an important force whether in the ranks of opposition or the halls of power. But what are the key factors driving their evolution? A timely and provocative reassessment, Hamid's account serves as an essential compass for those trying to understand where the region's varied Islamist groups have come from and where they might be headed.
The translation of an essay first published in Egypt in 1925, which took the contemporaries of its author by storm. At a time when the Muslim world was in great turmoil over the question of the abolition of the caliphate by Mustapha Kamal Ataturk in Turke