RELEVANCE THEORY IN FRIDAY KHUTBA

Emad S. Awad, Maram M. Qasim

Abstract


This study seeks to tackle the Muslim Friday khutba (speech) from a Relevance-Theoretic perspective (Sperber and Wilson 1995). Relevance Theory posits that the goal of communication is to maximize the relevance of the phenomena available to language users while minimize the amount of mental or cognitive processing effort. Three Friday khutbas are analyzed in order to explore how the khatibs (preachers) maximize the relevance of the topics in the khutbas to the audience utilizing the least processing effort.

 

Article visualizations:

Hit counter

DOI

Keywords


Friday Khutba; Islamic discourse; relevance theory

Full Text:

PDF

References


Ahmad, W. (2012). Creating a Society of Sheep? In Ahmad, Waqar ‏and Sardar, Ziauddin (eds.). Muslims in Britain: Making Social and Political Space. New York: Routledge. pp. 171-192.

Antoun, R. (1989). Muslim Preacher in the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Antoun, R. (1993). Themes and Symbols in the Religious Lesson: A Jordanian Case Study. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 25(4): 607-624.

Awad, E. S. (2017). "Intertextuality in Friday Khutba." Journal of Islamic Studies and Culture. 5(1): 59-75.

Bayat, A. (2007). Making Islam Democratic. California: Stanford University Press.

Brinton, J. (2015). Preaching Islamic Renewal. California: University of California Press.

Britton, C. and Doake, J. (2005). A Student Guide to Object-Oriented Development. Oxford: Elsevier.

Brown, J. (2007). Scripture as Communication. MI: Baker Academic.

Ezzidin, T. (2015). Egyptian journalist calls for protest to take off the hijab. http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/culture/egyptian-journalist-calls-for-protest-to-take-off-the-hijab_31417 (accessed 14 May 2016).

Garner, M. (2009). Preaching as a Communicative Event: A Discourse Analysis of Sermons by Robert Rollock (1555–1599). Reformation and Renaissance Review 9(1): 45-70.

Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and Conversation. In: Cole, Peter and Morgan, Jerry (eds.) Syntax and Semantics vol. 3. New York: Academic Press. pp. 41-58.

Halliday, M.A.K., and Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (Third Edition). London: Arnold.

Hashem, M. (2010). The Umma in the Khutba: A Religious Sermon or a Civil Discourse? Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 30 (1): 49-61.

https://isgh.org/survey/.

https://theislampost.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/the-prophets-wives-aisha-bint-abu-bakr-part-3/(cited 21 December 2017).

Jones, L. G. (2013). The Preaching of the Almohads: Loyalty and Resistance across the Strait of Gibrltar. In Liang, Y. et.al. (eds.). Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean. Leiden: Brill. pp. 71-101.

Kamp, Melanie. (2008). "Prayer Leader, Counselor, Teacher, Social Worker, and Public Relations Officer: On the Roles and Functions of Imams in Germany." In Al-Hamarneh, Ala and Thielmann, Jörn (eds.). Islam and Muslims in Germany. Leiden: Brill, 2008. pp. 133-160.

Kersten, C. and Olsson, S. (2013). Alternative Islamic Discourses and Religious Authority. NY: Routledge.

Pickthall. M. M. (1977). The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. Mecca: Al-Muslim World League.

Pieterse, H. J. C. (2010). Grounded Theory Approach in Sermon Analysis of Sermons on Poverty and Directed at the Poor as Listeners. Acta Theologica 30(2): 113-129.

Polon, L. and Cantwell, A. (1983). The Whole Earth Holiday Book. Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company.

Schmidt, R. and Kess, J. F. (1986). Television Advertising and Televangelism: Discourse Analysis of Persuasive Language. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. (2nd edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

al-Tabarani, A. A. S. (1995). Al-Mu'jam Al-'Awsat. Part one; Hadith no. 901. Cairo: Dar Al-Haramin.

Tayob, A. (1999). Islam in South Africa: Mosques, Imams, and Sermons. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Tendahl, M. (2009). A Hybrid Theory of Metaphor: Relevance Theory and Cognitive Linguistic. New York: Palgrave.

The Economist; 8 August 2015.

Van Dijk, T.A. (2009). Society and Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wiktorowicz, Q. (2001). The Management of Islamic Activism. NY: State University of New York Press.

Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (1994). "Outline of Relevance Theory." Links & Letters. 1: 85-106.

Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (1998). "Pragmatics and time." In Carston, R. and Uchida, S. (eds.). Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. pp. 1-22.

Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Winterton, W. (2015). Stories from History’s Dust Bin. Volume 1, Volume 1. Thinktank/Xlibris.com.

www.sunnah.com/tirmidhi/47. English reference: Vol. 5, Book 44, Hadith 3369; Arabic reference: Book 47, Hadith 3695.

Zainal Ariff, T. N. A. (2012). "Ethnographic discourse analysis: Conversion to Islam ceremony." Discourse & Communication (6)3: 295-322.


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The research works published in this journal are free to be accessed. They can be shared (copied and redistributed in any medium or format) and\or adapted (remixed, transformed, and built upon the material for any purpose, commercially and\or not commercially) under the following terms: attribution (appropriate credit must be given indicating original authors, research work name and publication name mentioning if changes were made) and without adding additional restrictions (without restricting others from doing anything the actual license permits). Authors retain the full copyright of their published research works and cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms are followed.

Copyright © 2018-2023. European Journal of Applied Linguistics Studies (ISSN 2602 - 0254 / ISSN-L 2602 - 0254). All rights reserved.

This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library. All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms. All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and standards formulated by Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) and Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Copyrights of the published research works are retained by authors.