Islamist Rhetoric

Language and Culture in Contemporary Egypt

Jacob Hoigilt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136901072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Islamism in Egypt is more diversified in terms of its sociology and ideology than is usually assumed. Through linguistic analysis of Islamist rhetoric, this book sheds light upon attitudes towards other Muslims, religious authority and secular society.

Examining the rhetoric of three central Islamist figures in Egypt today - Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Amr Khalid and Muhammad Imara - the author investigates the connection between Islamist rhetoric and the social and political structures of the Islamic field in Egypt. Highlighting the diversity of Islamist rhetoric, the author argues that differences of form disclose sociological and ideological tensions. Grounded in Systemic Functional Grammar, the book explores three linguistic areas in detail: pronoun use, mood choices and configurations of processes and participants. The author explores how the writers relate to their readers and how they construe concepts that are central in the current Islamic revival, such as 'Islamic thought', 'Muslims', and 'the West'.

Introducing an alternative divide in Egyptian public debate - between text cultures rather than ideologies - this book approaches the topic of Islamism from a unique analytical perspective, offering an important addition to the existing literature in the areas of Middle Eastern society and politics, Arabic language and religious studies.

1 Introduction

This book is an attempt at making sense of Islamism in Egypt from a linguistic point of view. It started with the idea of analysing critically the discourses of liberal Muslim thinkers and their Islamist counterparts to study the way language is put to use by different ideologies. My interest in this subject stemmed from the fact that the current intellectual climate in both Europe and the Arab world is characterized by what might be termed a war of ideas (between Islamism and secularism, liberalism and neo-conservatism) where printed texts play an important role. In Egypt, these conflicts have attracted much popular attention and have involved universities, the press, the Ministry of Culture and the courts.

My attention soon centred on the diversity of what Egyptians often call the Islamic trend (al-tayyār al-islāmī), a less restrictive term than the more regular label ‘Islamism’. I was baffled by the vivid and seemingly chaotic panorama of Islamist tendencies that shape the public sphere in Egypt. I do not mean here the various overt signs of a growing preoccupation with religion, like the prayer mark on the forehead of more and more men, the throngs of people gathering on pavements outside mosques at prayer time, and the many clothes shops selling ‘Islamic wear’ for women. My confusion resulted not from the eclectic blend of pop culture and an Islamic ethos on the streets of Cairo, but from the bewildering array of actors, conflicts, convergences and analyses in and of the Islamist trend. People who presumably shared more or less the same religious outlook, such as TV preachers, renegade shaykhs from al-Azhar and officials from the Muslim Brotherhood, were often in public skirmishes with each other.

In a much-cited volume about media in the Muslim world, Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson state that ‘[a] new sense of public is emerging throughout Muslim-majority states and Muslim communities elsewhere. It is shaped by increasingly open contests over the authoritative use of the symbolic language of Islam’ (Eickelman and Anderson 2003: 1).

Observing the pulsating and heterogeneous Islamist scene in Egypt and the pundits' disagreement about what it all meant, I could not help asking if what is being shaped, or rather transformed, is not merely the public, but the whole Islamic field itself, driven first and foremost by a multi-faceted Islamic awakening that is to some extent self-contradictory. In particular, I was struck by the great stylistic and rhetorical variety in Islamist discourse, as well as the it exhibits in relation to other discourses in both Egypt and Europe. It occurred to me that one among many ways of making sense of contemporary Islamism in Egypt is to explore the different kinds of rhetoric through which it is expressed. Consequently, I ended up writing a book mainly about the rhetoric of the Islamic trend in Egypt, with a view to understanding its complexity rather than criticizing its ideology. The discourses of three prominent Islamist figures were singled out for analysis: Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī, ‘Amr Khālid and Muḥammad ‘Imāra.

This, then, is a study in discourse. The term ‘discourse’ here means two things: first, the material fact of written texts. My source material is discourse in that it is composed of books written in some form of Modern Written Arabic, and, by studying the linguistic structure of these texts, the book aims at contributing to a better understanding of the Islamic field in contemporary Egypt. In addition to this meaning, I think of discourse in a more abstract sense: as a way of representing and organizing social relations and institutions. The presupposition I work from when thinking of discourse in this sense is that Islamic authors engage implicitly in cultural politics by their way of writing. Consequently, by studying not only what is said, but also how it is said, we can understand better what these texts do in their social and political context.

The epistemological framework for this inquiry is a moderate social constructionism based on the supposition that language use not only mirrors but also affects social reality. Specifically, the ideas and methodology of the British linguist Michael Halliday are central throughout the book. Halliday conceives of language as a ‘social semiotic’, by which he means ‘a system of meanings that constitutes the “reality” of the culture’ (Halliday 1978: 123).

In other words, the social system (or the ‘culture’) can be represented as a construction of meanings – as a semiotic system – and language is one way among many of exchanging these meanings (ibid.: 189). It follows from this that there is no clear line between what language is and how it is used; ‘all language is language-in-use, in a context of situation, and all of it relates to the situation’ (ibid.: 33).

This book focuses on the links between the ‘language’, ‘construction of meanings’ and ‘situations’ pertaining to the Islamic field in Egypt. More specifically, it revolves around the language use of different kinds of Islamists, who see it as their task to achieve an Islamic reform or awakening in Egypt and the Arab world. Although it is expressed in various terms and through various strategies, this is the shared aim of the authors examined here. They all call for religious reform, whether on the personal, social or political level.

At this point, I should specify what I mean by the term ‘Islamism’. A more detailed account of Egyptian Islamism is presented in Chapter 3; presently, I want to clarify how I conceive of this phenomenon in a general way. Islamism in this work is not defined exclusively in terms of organized political activity, exemplified by organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the call for the implementation of sharī‘a, as is usual in many contemporary works about the subject. While it may often be useful to restrict the analysis to political movements and processes, such an approach that are central to the development and current form of Islamism. Salvatore and Eickelman (2004: 14) have made a pertinent observation in this regard: ‘It is easy to think of such movements primarily in terms of their political influence. At their base, however, they appeal to their respective constituencies through their implicit and explicit invocation of shared moral understandings of social action.’

In line with this way of approaching the phenomenon, I think of Islamism in a wide sense, as a context more than a specific movement. Gregory Starrett has formulated the idea in an eloquent way:

The Islamic Trend, as I have labeled the wide range of cultural and social phenomena that include specifically political movements, is extremely complex. It ranges from the Islamization of the publishing industry and the increase in enrollment in Islamic studies programs, to the odious violence of terrorist organizations with scripture-based ideologies and the sophisticated legal maneuvering of Islamist lawyers within the court system. (…) [T]he Trend has moved beyond the level of a ‘movement’ to become one of the most important contexts in which everyday life is lived.

(Starrett 1998: 191–192)

What ideas this context consists of and the restrictions it imposes on public discourse are central concerns in Chapter 3. I should make it clear that my aim is not to describe and analyse Islamism as a system of thought, in part because excellent work along such lines has been carried out already (e.g. Al-Azmeh 1996; Euben 1999). Instead, I look at relationships between actors who can be labelled ‘Islamist’ and their relationship to other ideologies and communities, all from a linguistic point of view.

Islamism is intimately bound up with the question of orthodoxy in current Islamic thought, since, as Albrecht Hofheinz states, ‘orthodox is the normative order that is dominant in a particular society’ (Hofheinz 1996: 13). This concept needs to be mentioned here, since the object of analysis is texts that contribute, in different ways, to define specific views of Islamic thought and practice. This is a highly political and dynamic process; Islamic orthodoxy should not be understood as a static set of doctrines integral to Islam. As Talal Asad writes:

[O]rthodoxy is not a mere body of opinion but a distinctive relationship – a relationship of power. Wherever Muslims have the power to regulate, uphold, require or adjust correct practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine, or replace incorrect ones, there is the domain of orthodoxy.

(Asad 1993: 15)

Consequently, orthodoxy can mean different things in different places. In Egypt, the Islamic scholars (ulama) gradually became more integrated in the public sphere and became a socially and politically vocal group at the same time as Islamic activism was on the rise. I argue that recent decades have seen a convergence between Islamism and orthodoxy, where the Islamic scholars have role – shown, for example, by the prominent place that fatwa-seeking and professional religious advice and instruction have gained in the public sphere, especially in the mass media.

It has become clear that practices pertaining to the domains of both Islamic thought and Islamic behaviour are subject to all the regulatory processes mentioned by Asad in the quote above (the upholding of correct practices and the condemnation of incorrect ones, etc.) in politically and socially salient ways. They are administered by a highly diverse group of public Islamist figures and institutions that nevertheless share the aim of islamizing Egyptian society by way of a golden mean: centrism, or wasaṭiyya, a term that harks back to the Qur’ān's mention of a middle nation (Qur’ān 2: 143). Whether their targets are Islamic militants, the repressive state or liberal thinkers, these centrists see it as their task to defend an Islamic awakening (ṣaḥwa) that stays true to a perceived correct practice and is at the same time able to meet the challenges of contemporary society.

Perhaps as a consequence of this fact, the Islamic awakening is usually talked about in the singular by both actors and observers. Although such generalization is sometimes useful, it tends to obscure the many different ways in which Islamism is spread in society. My own disorientation when coming to Egypt stemmed exactly from the many actors and voices that met me in the limited domain of printed text about Islamic reform, and not least the various interpretations of these actors that I came across among observers. Treating Islamism as one undifferentiated entity runs the risk of blurring the vision and misunderstanding not only the positions of the different actors in the Islamic field, but also the processes going on there. Perhaps now more than ever, it is important to arrive at nuanced and sound conclusions about religious phenomena in a world that is becoming steadily more attentive to the role of religion in society and politics. Accordingly, my aim is not to analyse the systems of thought underlying Islamism as such. It is restricted to the less ambitious task of examining how various Islamist writers carve out roles for themselves and their readership, and how their textual strategies contribute to positioning them in the field of Islamic thought. My way of approaching this task is through a detailed linguistic analysis of selected textual features in written texts.

Two general sets of questions inform the analysis in the pages that follow. The first is to do with the different dimensions of Islamism, studied from the vantage point of rhetoric. In short, what persuasive tools are used to get this ideology across to people? Two points in particular are explored: the ways in which Islamist authors use pronominal reference and mood structures to build different kinds of relations with their readers; and their use of grammatical devices to construct images of Islam, Muslims and the ‘others’. Among the wide variety of possible discourses, I singled out three that are associated with different discourse communities: traditional religious guidance as found in the writings of Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī; the books of ’āmr Khālid, who is the leading figure among the ‘new preachers’ in Egypt and the Arab world; and the works of Muḥammad ’Imāra, who is a representative of centrist, intellectual Islamism. All Islam and the Arab world, but, compared to their importance in the cultural sphere, attention to what they actually say and how they say it has been small in Europe and the USA. This lack of attention is one of the reasons why I have chosen to quote extensively from their texts and provide English translations of all the quotes. In this way, both Arabic speakers and observers of the Arab world who do not know Arabic can get to know discourses that are shaping current Arab practices and conceptions of Islam, together with an analysis that situates these discourses within the wider cultural and religious sphere in Egypt and the Arab world.

This leads us to the second set of questions. What are the social and political roles of these discourses and their proponents in contemporary Egypt? Can the differences between their uses of persuasive tools tell us anything about the dynamics of Islamism as a phenomenon in Egypt? Are there significant ideological differences even within non-violent, mainstream Islamism? Within this cluster of questions, two lines of inquiry are focused on. The first concerns the Islamist attitude to the ‘other’, represented by both the West and liberal and/or secular Arab tendencies. This subject has been a central one in studies of Islamist ideology since Foucault's impact on studies of ideology and Edward Said's Foucault-inspired criticism of Orientalism (Said 1995). In cultural terms, the consensus is that Islamism in its various forms presupposes an absolute and essential difference between an authentic ‘self’ based in Islam and a corrupted and corruptive ‘other’ that has been associated with Western thought and society since the early 1900s. Thus, Islamist discourse takes the form of ‘confronting the Other’ (Ismail 1998), to the extent where it constitutes an ‘Orientalism in reverse’ (al-Azm 1984). My aim is to take a detailed look at the extent to which and how the ‘other’ is approached and defined in the three discourses in question here. Can any differences be discerned and, if so, what is their significance? The second line of inquiry addresses the complexity of the Islamist scene in Egypt and the Arab world. While it is relatively unproblematic to claim that all Islamists subscribe to basically the same religious doxa, there are obvious differences between them regarding their social positions and subject matters. The question is then how a study of their rhetoric can make sense of the tension between their shared ideology and different social positions and, as a result, refine our understanding of contemporary Islamism.

In addition to these two practical aims, the book attempts to contribute new insight on the theoretical level. It applies a theory and methodology that are relatively new to the field of Arabic text linguistics on texts that have been little explored from a linguistic viewpoint previously. By this approach I hope to be able to compare my results with previous research on Arabic discourse and society, and to add to our knowledge of contemporary Arabic rhetoric generally. At the general level of discourse studies, the Arab world and the connections there between discourse and society remain surprisingly understudied, and this is also the case with modern, critical text linguistic analyses of religious discourse. Instead, fields like gender, politics, racism, education and institutional language have received much attention in discourse studies. On this background, the present work will hopefully show that religious discourse is a vital and interesting field for discourse studies.

These comments situate the book at the intersection between contemporary Islamic studies and text linguistics, or Arabic text linguistics, to be specific. Short and selective surveys of both fields are necessary to indicate the potential usefulness of this book in relation to them.

The field of Arabic text linguistics and rhetoric is not a wholly new one. In fact, the latter discipline has a long and rich tradition. The Arab rhetoricians developed amazingly sophisticated and subtle concepts about language use. In contrast to the grammarians, they ‘systematically interpreted the formal and semantic properties of utterances as related to the communicative functions they fulfil in the interaction between speaker (mutakallim) and addressee (muxāṭab)’ (Bohas et al. 1990: 121).

Despite its merits and intrinsic interest, however, classical Arabic rhetoric is not a suitable analytical tool for the problem at hand. The most important reason for this is that, perhaps as the inevitable result of its evaluative character and religious source, it soon became distinctly normative. This is a tendency that seems to have persisted in modern approaches to Arabic rhetoric (e.g. Abdul-Raof 2006), where the concern is mostly pedagogical: how to speak and write effectively. It should also be mentioned that there exists another tradition, less known, of oratory art, namely ‘ilm (or fann) al-khaṭāba, which is associated with preaching. This is an area of research that has recently received some attention (Gaffney 1994 and, to a greater extent, Halldén 2001 and 2005), but, since we are concerned with written books here, I will not delve into the issue of preaching.

Accordingly, we have to make recourse to the intersection between modern Arabic linguistics and discourse studies. Modern Arabic linguistics is a well-established discipline with many subfields, but rather scant attention has been given to text linguistics or discourse analysis. In an overview from 1990, Mushira Eid identifies only two works in Arabic discourse analysis, and neither of them is concerned with the relationship between discourse and social structures or ideology (Eid 1990: 26). Eid's overview was actually the start of the series Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, which continues today, but, barring the obvious exceptions of diglossia and dialect studies, which are anyway issues in spoken language, relatively little has appeared in this series about discourse and society.

An updated overview of the field is given in the informative entry ‘Discourse analysis’ by Ahmed Fakhri in the new Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (Versteegh et al. 2006). This entry shows that discourse studies is still a relatively new field in Arabic linguistics, although important advances have been made in some areas. Fakhri makes a useful distinction between two general kinds of Arabic discourse analysis. On the one hand, there are studies that deal with

how sentences are put together to form larger chunks of discourse and with the identification, description, and explanation of systematic patterns of discourse organization. On the other hand, there are studies which investigate how language is used in social interaction and attempt to relate aspects of the structure of discourse to contextual factors such as the purpose of the interaction or interlocutors' traits, shared knowledge, and role relationships.

(Fakhri 2006: 647)

The present book falls within the second group of discourse studies. However, the work on discourse organization is also relevant to the present stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Arabic Linguistics Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on transliteration and translation
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Rhetorical analysis and the study of social reality
• 3 Islamic ideology and the public sphere in Egypt
• 4 The rhetoric of religious authority
• 5 The rhetoric of religious passion
• 6 The rhetoric of religious polemics
• 7 Rhetoric and religious ideology
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index