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Article published In: The Discourse of Terrorism
Edited by Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio and Juan L. Castro
[Pragmatics and Society 13:3] 2022
► pp. 477–500

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Under the shadow of swords: The Rhetoric of Jihad

A corpus-based critical analysis of religious metaphors in jihadist magazines

 | University of Granada
Published online: 21 July 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21017.pat
Abstract
The ideological discourse of Jihadist groups like Al Qaeda or Islamic State is largely built on the use of persuasive techniques which act as instruments for radicalisation and recruitment, and more generally, “convince the audience of the veracity of the doctrine presented” (Adam, Martin. 2017. Persuasion in religious discourse: Enhancing credibility in sermon titles and openings. Discourse and Interaction 10(2): 5–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 5). This article explores the use of metaphor as an important rhetorical and ideological dimension to jihadist texts. Current findings suggest that religious writings often make use of rich conceptual metaphors to convey distinctive ideological perspectives (Prentice, Sheryl, Paul Rayson, and Paul J. Taylor. 2012. The language of Islamic extremism: Towards an automated identification of beliefs, motivations and justifications. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17(2): 259–286. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), for instance, the well-known journey conceptual metaphor, with the image schemata of a path, leading towards a better life, reward in an afterlife, moral choice, hope, and a closeness to God (Jäkel, Olaf. 2002. Hypotheses revisited: The cognitive theory of metaphor applied to religious texts. Metaphorik.de 2(1): 20–42.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Specifically, the research adopts a Critical Metaphor Analysis framework (Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. New York: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), which combines Corpus Linguistics with Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. The data for this study is taken from a collection of jihadist online magazines. The corpus has been compared against the Qur’an in order to ascertain whether jihadist propaganda writers are inspired by conventional religious tropes as a way of giving authority to their doctrines. The results show that religiously inspired concepts do indeed help the writers to anchor their message to a deeply seated and authoritative set of ideologies. At the same time, semantic and pragmatic differences in the use of these metaphors suggest an ability to manipulate pre-existing conceptualisations in order to fulfil the communicative needs of the writers, i.e. to embody the principles of jihadism. The findings presented here focus on the following domains: religion as a journey; light as good; heat as fighting; and spirituality as nature.
Article outline
  • 2.Introduction
  • 3.Context of the research
    • 3.1Persuasion and the language of terror
    • 3.2Metaphor in religion
  • 4.Methodology and data
    • 4.1The corpora
    • 4.2Critical metaphor analysis framework
  • 5.Analysis and discussion
    • 5.1The path to jihad: journey metaphors
    • 5.2‘One who does not have a scorching beginning will not have a shining end’: Heat, light and darkness metaphors
    • 5.3‘Bring forth the dead’: Spirituality and nature
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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