Empowering Women: A Multi-perspective Discourse Analysis of Women’s Dignity and Equality in Qur’an

Abstract

According to Qur'an, God's divine merit-demerit system never allows for any biased treatment towards men or women. Dignity instead is what God has granted on all children of Adam. The present article, hence, sought to trace back women's dignity and equality to the discourse of Qur'an working on a sample of 11 Surahs. The discourse analysis was based on combinatory perspectives of text linguistics, pragmatics, and rhetoric. The results revealed that the most salient marked discoursal devices of women's equality and dignity were the techniques such as parallelism, anaphoric repetitions, juxtaposition of the believers' attributes, emphatic negative propositions. In addition, the sometimes situated hierarchical pattern of relationship between men and women were not indicative of any unfair evaluation of either gender. Instead, the yardstick was the amount of the believers' efforts in the way of God's "forgiveness and reward".