The rhetoric of Islamic activism: ADICTIONstudy

Abstract

Given the paucity of understanding in the West regarding Middle Eastern discourse, this study provides a careful description of Islamic activist rhetoric. Using DICTION, a program that calculates some 40 different stylistic variables and 5 master variables, we compared the rhetoric of Western politicians, protestors, preachers, and pundits to that of Islamic activists. Relative to the West, the Islamic sample was relatively hopeful and communal, extremely doctrinaire, and often had a transcendental tone. Analysis within the Islamic sample showed it to be more flexible and variegated than might have been expected. Intriguingly, the rhetoric of violent Islamists was more optimistic than that of their nonviolent brethren. The violent groups were more likely to embrace charismatic authority and to substitute ideology for practicality. In short, our findings confirm some popular expectations of Muslim discourse but also call into question a number of received truths, all of which suggests that much more needs to be learned about the voices of Islam.

Rhetoric in Islamic Tradition: Paradigm and Its Development

“…Islamic rhetoric has the peculiarity of combining the beauty of poetic and metaphysical language and combining language, politics, and religion (Hart & Lind, 2011). Although the basic principles of religion have not changed, the way to spread religion will always change (Al-Qardhawi, 2007).…”

“…Islamic rhetoric, which is humanistic and full of messages of unity and compassion, has been misunderstood by certain circles through confrontational diction (Hart & Lind, 2011). Through an open space that targets a broader circle of people without boundaries, Da'wah, if carried out with frivolous narrative, diction, and style, will damage the image of Islamic rhetoric itself and on relations and social life in general.…”

Five considerations for engaging with Big Data from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective

“…13 This common ground cuts both ways: it can guide our own rhetorical analyses if the questions we raise in our research require the kind of voluminous, varied, and volatile textual data that define Big Data approaches (see e.g. Bod, 2013a;Graham et al, 2015;Gray & Holmes, 2020;Hart & Lind, 2011;Koteyko, 2015;Majdik, 2019;Waisanen & Kafka, 2020). It can also serve as a resource for critique, acting as a lens through which uses and applications of Big Data can be assessed from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective based on Big Data's own functional definitions about what Big Data is and ought to be.…”

Sustainable Supply Chain Based on News Articles and Sustainability Reports: Text Mining with Leximancer and DICTION

“…DICTION is based on linguistic theory and uses 33 different dictionaries. DICTION uses its algorithms and statistical weighting procedures on passages to calculate the scores for a theme/variable [142]. DICTION allows the quantitative analysis of qualitative material [143,144].…”