Semantic Framing of JIHAD in the Holy Qur’an and Selected Web Narratives: A Contrastive Discourse Analytic Study

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Department of English, Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages), Ain Shams University, Egypt

Abstract

The present paper aims at framing the concept of JIHAD in the light of Barsalou’s (1992b) Frame Theory. Originally a religious concept; JIHAD has been recently used in a multitude of contexts by a variety of, mostly conflicting, parties. The researcher analyses the corpora under investigation to create contrastive semantic frames of the concept of JIHAD as represented in the Holy Qur’an- as a reference corpus- and enTenTen13, as a parallel corpus. As Barsalou points out, “a frame provides the fundamental representation of knowledge in human recognition” (1992, p.21). These frames are to highlight the basic co-occurring attributes and values of the concept of JIHAD. The enTenTen13-based frame is further studied in the light of critical discourse analysis (CDA), and more precisely in the light of Van Dijk’s (2006) model of triangulated manipulation. Cognitively, Dijk sees “manipulation as mind control [which] involves the interference with processes of understanding, the formation of biased mental models and social representations such as knowledge and ideologies” (p. 359). The researcher concludes that in the enTenTen13-based JIHAD frame, the values of the relevant attributes are differently instantiated from those of the Qur’an-based frame. Considering that the Qur’an provides the prototypical attribute values, these variations in instantiation are proven as ideologically-driven; hence an instance of manipulation.

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