Muslim preachers’ pandemics related discourses within social media: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis

Abstract

Pandemics have been extensively represented in different discourse genres including journalistic discourse, media discourse, medical discourse, social media discourse, and academic discourse. This study explores the representation of COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox in the Arab Muslim preachers’ discourses on Twitter and Facebook. The Muslim preachers’ discourses remain one of the influential discourses that informs the ideology of its believers, as it is largely based on the Islamic authoritative discourses of the Quran and the Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. The data set of 538 postings was generated through an extended observation of purposively recruited Arab Muslim non-mainstream scholars’ postings on Facebook and Twitter from March 2019 to August 2022. The data were analyzed using corpus-based critical discourse analysis. The twofold analytical lens involving CL and CDA revealed that Muslim preachers frequently used ideological semantic patterns in communicating to the Muslim society at large regarding the pandemics. The utilized semantic patterns emerged as embedded in certain ideological frames established in the Islamic authoritative discourses of the Quran and the Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. In their ideological representation of the pandemics, Muslim preachers framed the entire three pandemics mostly as the wrath of God. Religious scholars’ postings cannot be considered an account of teaching and preaching; rather, they merely consume and produce Islamic ideology in a way to manipulate and influence Muslims’ knowledge of existing reality by adding new meanings in line with the chosen ideological frames.

Keywords:

• CBDA
• corpus
• ideological representation
• Muslim preachers
• pandemics-related discourse
• social media

1. Introduction

Religious discourse plays an important role in the life of millions around the world, especially in the Muslim world, as the majority of Muslims believe Islam as a complete code of life (Hashmi et al., 2021; Rashid et al., 2018). Over the long history of Islam, religious discourses have shown the potential of influencing millions of Muslims around the world by shaping and strengthening their ideological viewpoints (Bakar et al., 2017; Hashmi et al., 2020). Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have attracted the attention of preachers and religious scholars to utilize these interactive platforms to disseminate their religious standpoints on the contemporary issues (Hashmi et al., 2020; Rashid et al., 2018). In recent years, COVID-19 pandemic has occupied a considerable space in the Muslims’ religious sermons (Hashmi et al., 2023) and recent outbreaks of Swine flu and monkey pox may have also drawn the attention of religious scholars. Muslim scholars’ religious discourse has been able to promote certain ideological standpoints among the Muslims on certain regional and global incidents. The social media platforms have equally equipped the Muslim preachers to address Muslims, to mobilize them for certain religious and political goals (Bakar et al., 2017; Scardigno & Giuseppe, 2020), and to disseminate certain ideological orientations (Awan, 2016; Koura, 2018). In other words, social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter are frequently used to express more subjective opinions and thus, the framing of religious and social discourses is not always without an agenda (Hashmi et al., 2021; Kgatle, 2018). Today, many religious scholars use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to express their opinions on contemporary global issues. Muslim preachers, in particular, often use Islamic authoritative frames to represent human suffering in their ideological discourses (Hashmi et al., 2023) and thus, these Muslim scholars’ postings within social media seem to have a strong potential of framing ideological representations of the COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey Pox pandemics.

The concept of framing is closely associated with agenda setting, as social media content is constructed to shape persuasive narratives that can significantly influence public opinions and beliefs, thereby shaping the reality that surrounds them (Baden, 2010; Entman, 2007; Hallahan, 1999; Hashmi et al., 2022; McQuail & Deuze, 2020). Baden (2010) has pointed out that applying frames not only contributes to the construction of social meanings but also amplifies belief systems. Framing strategies are considered to be used to manipulate the existing information of the target audience in order to regulate and control their belief systems. Entman (2007) defines framing as the process of minimizing certain aspects of perceived reality and emphasizing new aspects to maximize the influence of the associations that endorse a certain perception. This definition implies that through framing, social media users can persuasively influence the audience to see reality through a certain religious, political, or social frame, and framing the ideological representation of the pandemics by Muslim preachers is no exception.

The language and framing used by Muslim preachers on social media platforms to represent pandemics such as Swine flu, COVID-19, and Monkey pox are of particular interest. Further examination of their use of social media and the impact of their messaging is necessary to fully understand how these religious scholars are influencing public discourse and shaping the religious narrative on these issues. This study is limited to the discourses of Muslim preachers who use social media to express their religious opinions within the context of Saudi Arabia. It should be noted that the Sunni schools of jurisprudence are the officially implemented, enacted, and accepted theological doctrine in these countries. Therefore, Muslim preachers who engage with social media can be considered as the followers of officially implemented theological doctrine. Thus, this study aims to examine the linguistic features and discursive practices used by these preachers to reproduce certain ideologies and frame the pandemics in question. The study also attempts to identify how Muslim preachers employed frames at various levels of the spread of pandemics by answering the following research question:

How do the Muslim preachers in Arab countries incorporate ideological frames in the representation of COVID-19, Swine flu and Monkey pox on different levels of outbreak?

2. Literature review

Religious discourse provides a framework for interpreting events through the lens of a particular religious belief system, offering ideological representations that are shaped by concepts such as divine plan, moral lessons, religious prophecies, and teachings (K. Li & Zhang, 2022). These representations have the potential to shape the way people understand and interpret historical events, which in turn can influence their understanding of contemporary events in the world (Ittefaq & Ahmad, 2018).

Since the advent of social media, religious discourses in Islam have gained significant attention, as Muslim religious scholars now have the opportunity to disseminate their ideas and interpretations of Islamic teachings across various platforms (Ismail et al., 2018; Nisa, 2018). These discourses serve as a framework for producing Muslim ideologies and are considered by Muslims to be a guide for religious understanding and practices (Hashmi et al., 2021; K. Li & Zhang, 2022). In contemporary Muslim societies, Muslim scholars use social media to guide their followers on religious practices and social issues. At times, they engage in debates and dialogues with other scholars and members of the community who challenge their expressed standpoint or require further elaborationAs a result, religious scholars’ interpretations can be a powerful tool for shaping Muslims’ understanding of religion and contemporary issues (K. Li & Zhang, 2022).

The past few years have seen a growing interest in the representation of Muslims’ religious discourses on social media (Khan et al., 2019). The outbreak of various political conflicts around the world that hold Muslims and Muslim countries responsible for the respective unrest has increased the representation of Muslims’ discourses both offline and online (Brooks, 2019). The conflicts that emerged after the September 11 attacks, where Muslim groups and countries were accused of the terrorist attacks in the United States of America, provide the best example that has caused a rebirth of Muslims’ religious discourses over the past two decades (Bakali, 2019). Since then, different studies have been conducted to explore why Muslims hate the West, following President G. W. Bush’s question, “Why do they hate us?” (Bakali, 2019; Olteanu et al., 2018). Consequently, there is an unprecedented interest in the representation of Muslims’ ideologies related to intolerance, terrorism, and jihad in religious discourses (Mahmut, 2019; Rubin, 2020). The popularity of Muslims’ religious discourses in social media is rooted in the representation of a broad Islamic ideology to compete with other ideologies (Mathew et al., 2019). Due to the unprecedented consumption of social media sites to disseminate religious discourses and promote linked ideologies, it seems difficult now to separate Muslims’ religious discourses from the overall use of social media platforms in Muslim countries (Solahudin & Fakhruroji, 2020).

In recent years, numerous studies (e.g. Nisa, 2018; Richards, 2016; Rudner, 2017; Vergani, 2014) have been conducted to investigate the framing of ideologies in Muslims’ religious discourses. Social media platforms have provided Muslim preachers and scholars with rare opportunities to convey their messages and ideologies to millions of believers worldwide (Richards, 2016; Vergani, 2014). In this sense, Muslim preachers have utilized social media platforms to convey the ideological representations of global events such as 9/11 and the Tsunami through their religious discourses, which have eventually endorsed and conveyed Muslims’ ideologies to millions of users instantly (Nisa, 2018). Due to the influential role in the production and reproduction of Muslim ideologies, religious scholars’ discourses caused misinterpretations of terrorism and intolerance while disseminating the ideological concept of jihad in Islam (Rudner, 2017).

In his analysis of the representation of terror in the discourse of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS], Rudner (2017) asserted that constructing religious discourse in social networking sites is considered a form of social practice where the constructed discourse involves an interaction between the discourse producer and its recipients through the encoding/decoding process. Analyzing the social practices of ISIS, Rudner (2017) concluded that social media platforms were extensively used to construct discourses with the purpose of achieving political and economic interests. It was through social media engagement that ISIS convinced many users by reflecting and reproducing Muslims’ ideologies in its propagative discourses.

Likewise, Ismail et al. (2018) pointed out that social media platforms enabled religious preachers and scholars to construct different ideologies over the recent years. In this sense, Muslim preachers consider social media as an apparatus to transmit the values and ideologies of Muslim institutions and groups. Therefore, we cannot separate Muslims’ ideology from their discourses because ideologies are expressed and reproduced through discourses in online and offline interactions.

The field of discourse studies maintains that language plays a critical role in the process of representation, as it serves as the medium through which events and ideologies are conveyed. As a result, reality is not simply reflected but is instead reproduced through linguistic devices and choices (K. Li & Zhang, 2022). Religious discourses, utilizing these linguistic devices and choices, not only produce and reproduce ideologies but also shape the lives of their adherents (Mathew et al., 2019; Solahudin & Fakhruroji, 2020). It should be noted that the concept of religious discourse as a means of producing ideologies does not imply that religious discourse forces individuals to accept the constructed ideology; instead, the internal persuasiveness of its semantic prosody appeals to the desires, fantasies, self-interest, and faith of its recipients, making religious discourses hegemonic discourses (Halim, 2018). Through the strategy of hegemony, religious institutions play a significant role in propagating particular patterns of faith to sustain the dominance of the dominating class over a society (Nisa, 2018). Moreover, religious discourses, through their powerful semantic prosody, influence, and convince individuals to accept the dominant religious standpoint of their own free will. In this way, religious discourse through social media platforms sustains hegemony by achieving consensus, acceptance, and legitimacy of dominant ideological standpoints (Mathew et al., 2019; Solahudin & Fakhruroji, 2020; K. Li & Zhang, 2022; Hashmi et al., 2023).

With the recent pandemics, such as COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey Pox, social media platforms have become a dynamic tool for interaction between religious scholars from Muslim majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia, and their followers. In particular, the intensive engagement of preachers in constructing religious discourses on social media is evident in the Gulf countries, especially in Saudi Arabia, which is considered the historic center of Islamic ideology (Abdul Cader, 2015; Hashmi et al., 2023).

The above discussion suggests that the fundamental feature of religious discourses is the tone or emotional coloring linked to the conveyed ideology (semantic prosody) through the use of language. Linguistic choices make the discourse powerful and influential for the audience. This study suggests that ideological semantic prosody in the religious discourses of Muslim scholars can have a significant impact on the audience by shaping their emotional response to the constructed discourses. For example, when a religious discourse offers a positive semantic prosody, it may evoke feelings of hope, inspiration, and encouragement in the audience that can make them more positive about the topic being discussed and more open to the ideas being presented (K. Li & Zhang, 2022). On the other hand, when a discourse uses a negative semantic prosody, it may evoke feelings of fear, anxiety, or mistrust in the audience, leading them to be more skeptical of the existing ideas (K. Li & Zhang, 2022). Additionally, semantic prosody can also influence the sense of authority of the audience and credibility of the speaker and thus, a discourse that uses a confident and assertive semantic prosody may be perceived as more credible and authoritative by the audience, whereas a discourse with hesitant or uncertain semantic prosody may be perceived as less credible (Zottola, 2018).

To summarize, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on global health, economy, and social life. As the world grapples with the consequences of the pandemic, the role of social media and the discourses surrounding it have become increasingly important. This is particularly true for Muslim communities, where religious teachings and beliefs can shape attitudes towards pandemics and influence the response to them. Despite the significance of these discourses, there is a lack of research on how Muslim scholars on social media have represented pandemics such as COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox. This gap in the literature is particularly concerning as Muslim communities have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with some studies suggesting that negative attitudes towards vaccines and public health measures have been influenced by conspiracy theories and misinformation spread on social media. To address this gap, this study employs a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to explore the discursive and linguistic choices made by Muslim preachers on social media in their representations of pandemics. In particular, this study uses the cognitive-based discourse analysis (CBDA) framework, which combines CDA with cognitive linguistics, to examine how Muslim scholars construct their messages about pandemics.

3. Theoretical framework

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) represents one of the areas of increasing importance in various humanities, as the fields of discourse analysis have varied to include the fields of literature, culture, politics and even health and education (Schiffrin et al., 2008). Dealing with discourse as an embodiment of individual in his/her relations with existing institutions and in an ideological context leads towards profound and influential fields of research (Xiao et al., 2019; Yu et al., 2021). The main objective of CDA is to study the relationships between language use and social practices. CDA focuses on the role of rhetorical practices in maintaining social order and social change (Chen & Hu, 2019; F. Li, 2017; Hart, 2010). As an analytical framework for discourse analysis, CDA reinforces the principle that text cannot be understood or analyzed in isolation; rather, it is understood only in relation to other texts and social contexts (van Dijk, 2011).

Representation in discourse studies depends mainly on language as a sign system that includes sounds and written symbols. This system is considered the medium in which we make sense of the world, wherein meanings are produced and exchanged between people (Baker et al., 2013; Bouvier, 2018). The definition of representation by Hartley (2003) suggests that while some representations are uncontroversial, such as the representation of rain in cinema, others may be subject to controversy due to the selection process influenced by cultural and political discourses. For instance, the representation of “race” can vary in different cultural and political contexts.

To understand the ideological representations in discourse studies, one must relate all the terms connected to certain ideology to show how the ideology is regarded as a kind of discourse and how it provides representations of reality, not reality itself, and how it demonstrates its relationship with the connected terms (Zottola, 2018). This study aims to leverage the qualitative and quantitative affordances of corpus-based critical discourse analysis to investigate how Muslim preachers incorporate ideological frames in their discourses on social media to represent pandemics. In recent years, the combination of Corpus Linguistics (CL) and CDA approaches has gained popularity for analyzing ideological discourses (Efe & Ozer, 2015; O’Regan & Riordan, 2018; Zottola, 2018). While presenting an overview of both approaches is beyond the scope of this study, the researchers agree with Zottola (2018) and Liu (2020) that the combination of CL and CDA provides a rich framework for triangulating findings, thereby increasing the reliability of the results and discussion.

CDA not only provides a theoretical framework for understanding the process of discourse construction, but it also offers a unique analytical framework when combined with CL (O’Regan & Riordan, 2018; Yu et al., 2021; Zottola, 2018). This study adopts Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional model, which has been frequently utilized by researchers to analyze ideological discourses due to its availability under the Creative Commons license, providing unrestricted opportunities to use the model and its components for research purposes. The model reveals how discourse is influenced by ideology and power relations. Figure 1 presents the conceptualization of the model for the discourse analysis.

Figure 1. Three dimensional model of CDA (Fairclough, 1995, p. 98).

As a theoretical framework, this model presents the construction of discourse as a three-dimensional process that involves text, discourse practice, and social-cultural practice (Fairclough, 2001). As an analytical lens, the model proposes three sub-levels of analysis for conducting a critical discourse analysis: “description,” “interpretation,” and “explanation” (Fairclough, 1995). Description involves the analysis of linguistic features such as the structure of the text; while interpretation entails analyzing discourse practices such as elements of a particular belief system and ideology incorporated in the text’s construction. In contrast, explanation pertains to socio-cultural practices that emerge from discourse practices (Fairclough, 1995). Following this model, three steps must be taken in conducting discourse analysis: “description,” “interpretation,” and “explanation” (Fairclough, 1995). Description involves providing a detailed account of the structural features of the text. Interpretation entails analyzing the process of discourse formation; while explanation refers to analyzing the relationship between discourse and society (Fairclough, 1995).

Given that the objective of this study is to investigate how Muslim preachers ideologically represent the pandemics and incorporate ideological frames in their discourse on social media, combining CL and CDA is deemed an appropriate analytical framework for this research. In the first phase of this study, a quantitative analysis was conducted using CL to identify, compare, and contrast the keywords, collocates, and clusters based on their respective frequencies and “keyness” effect. Simultaneously, in the second phase, a qualitative analysis was performed on the keywords in context to unfold the discourse through the “description” of the text, the “interpretation” of the discourse, and the “explanation” of the socio-cultural practices in relation to society.

4. Methodology

This study pursues a corpus-based critical discourse analysis approach to examine the linguistic representation of the recent pandemics COVID-19, Monkey pox, and Swine flu in the Muslim preachers’ discourses on social media. For the identification of participants of this study, researchers followed famous Muslim religious scholars on Twitter and Facebook in Saudi Arabia. Using the snowball technique, 48 religious scholars were identified who can be described as Muslim Leaders and social media influencers. The status of the identified scholars was reconfirmed by the nine religious scholars of the locality whom the researchers knew personally. The Muslim preachers on social media with “open to public” accounts were retained as the final participants of this study. The participant religious scholars’ postings on Facebook and Twitter were observed for six months from February 2022 to August 2022, whereas during this period, the participants’ previous postings since March 2019 were gathered as source of corpus in order to gain insights into the potential discursive differences. In this sense, the actual observation of the participants’ postings on Facebook and Twitter elapsed over three years which provided a total of 4380 postings. Criteria for the inclusion of postings in this study were developed as:

1. only firsthand postings on the participants’ “open to public accounts” are included, and duplicates resulting from shared and retweeted posting are excluded;

2. postings in Arabic language only are included;

3. postings must contain at least one search term from each of the two following groups;

   1. الله (God), إله (God), رب (God)

   2. كورونا (Corona), كوفيد (COVID), جدري القرود (Monkey pox), انفلوانزا الخنازير (Swine flu) and فيروس (Virus); and

(4) postings that consider COVID-19 as a conspiracy against Islam are excluded because such postings deny the existence of pandemics in the Muslims’ Holy cities of Makkah and Madinah (see Hashmi et al., 2023). That is not the scope of this study.

As per strict government policies concerning the residents and religion-related matters, researchers argue not to disclose the names or use pseudonyms for official profiles on Facebook and Twitter. In her article for Research Ethics Journal, Willis (2019), who is a researcher at University of Oxford, pointed out that the postings on social media accounts, groups, and pages that are open to public are considered public data as they can be approached without any password nor approval of the respective account holders or the admins and thus can be used for research purposes where waiving off informed consent is justified in terms of research ethics. Similarly, Twitter’s privacy statement discloses, “What you say on the Twitter services may be viewed all around the world instantly. You are what you Tweet!” This statement witnesses that Twitter levels no restriction to observing and using non-protected data. The researchers echo these arguments and thus the Muslim preachers’ “open to public” postings were considered as public data, with no obligatory informed consent from each religious scholar who publicly posted on Facebook and Twitter.

Regarding the consideration of social media postings as corpus, a “corpus” in general entails the “collections of texts that are stored and accessed electronically” (Hunston, 2002, p. 2), whereas CL refers to as “the study of language based on examples of real life language use” (McEnery & Wilson, 2001, p. 1). It is further emphasized “while agreeing that CL is really a domain of research, it is indeed a methodology, applications of which have been widely recognized now in many areas and theories of linguistics” (Efe & Ozer, 2015, p. 4). The studies that employ CL as methodology are considered corpus-based discourse studies (Liu, 2020; Efe & Ozer, 2015) and thus, the Muslim religious scholars’ postings involving the use of real-life language are considered the corpus for this study.

All the postings from the participants were perused in line with the inclusion criteria to constitute a corpus of relevant postings for this study. The audit provided a corpus of 538 relevant postings that was organized into text files in accordance with the requirement of the AntConc, a famous software for corpus linguistic analysis. The corpus was grouped into three sub-corpora: CovCor for Covid-19, SwinCor for Swine flu, and MonCor for Monkey pox. AntConc version 4.1.4 (Anthony, 2022) is equipped with a set of tools to identify the linguistic features of the corpus such as word lists, N-grams, key word in context (KWIC) or concordance lines, concordance plots, clusters, collocates, and keywords and their keyness. More specifically, this study leverages the Cluster tool, which helps in identifying the frequent keywords related to the searched terms; the KWIC Tool, which generates the concordance lines to show the searched keywords in their context as they occur in the corpus; the Collocates tool, which provides the collocations of keywords along with their frequencies; and the Plot Tool, which illustrates the occurrences of the keywords in the corpus. These tools provided the discursive patterns related to the pandemics on the two simultaneous stages such as the stage when the pandemics spread out in non-Muslim majority countries such as China, America, and European countries, and the stage when the pandemics reached out to Muslim majority countries such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.

Simultaneously, having analyzed the linguistic features of the corpus through quantitative analysis, this study embarked on Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis to interpret and explain discursive practices and socio-cultural practices. Embarking on Fairclough’s (1995) proposition of language as social practice that entails the representation of ideologies and power relations through the language, this study attempts to elucidate the Muslim preachers’ ideological representations of the pandemics of COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox in their pandemic-related discourses on social media.

5. Analysis and discussion

Three major search terms were used as initial keywords as shown in Table 1, in three successive engagements in AntConc for CovCor, MonCor, and SwinCor, respectively, to run the tools of Cluster, KWIC, Plot, Collocates, and Keywords.

Table 1. Initial keywords representing three sub corpora

Sub corpora	Initial keywords	Transliteration	English translation
CovCor	فيروس كورونا	Feros corona	COVID-19
SwinCor	انفلوانزا الخنازير	Influ-anza-al-khanazeer	Swine flu
MonCor	جدري القرود	Judri-al-qurood	Monkey pox

This study attempts to explore all the dimensions of ideological representation of the pandemics for which these three corpora are compared and contrasted with one another at the level of clusters, collocates, concordance lines, and keyness of the keywords in spite of the fact that some tools such as Collocate Tool, Cluster Tool, and Concordance lines may provide similar insights into the patterns of semantic representations across the sub-corpora. In a quest to reach potential minute differences in representations that may affect the results of discourse analysis, it is justified to go beyond the selective application of tools in spite of the potential overlaps in the findings.

Utilizing the Cluster Tool, the initial keywords فيروس كورونا, جدري القرود, and انفلوانزا الخنازيرwere utilized to identify further keywords in the clusters. Using the advanced setting interface, three-word clusters were identified across the three sub corpora CovCor, SwinCor and MonCor. Figure 2 shows the identified clusters in CovCor.

Figure 2. Three-word clusters in CovCor.

The emerged clusters from the CovCor provided the keywords in relation to COVID-19 wherein عقاب من الله (punishment from God) emerged as the most frequent cluster followed by غضب من الله (God’s wrath), على أعداء الله (on the enemies of God), أمة يأجوج ماجوج (nation of Gog and Magog), جائحة يأجوج ماجوج (pandemic of Gog and Magog), يأجوج ومأجوج تسببو (Gog Magog caused), ابتلاء من الله (affliction from God), بسبب التعذيب المسلمين (because of torture on the Muslims), الله يستوجب التوبة (God demands repentance), السلطات الصينية الظالمة (cruel Chinese authorities), and لسبب قتل الأويجور (due to the Uyghurs’ killings). The keywords and phrases such as punishment, wrath, enemies, affliction, torture on the Muslims, repentance, Gog Magog and Uyghurs’ killings were identified as the key lexical items that structured the semantic patterns of representation of COVID-19.

Successively, to identify the three word clusters in the MonCor, Cluster Tool in AntConc was run. Figure 3 presents the identified clusters in the MonCor.

Figure 3. Three-word clusters in MonCor.

The clusters that emerged from MonCor in relation to Monkey pox: جدري القرود عقاب (Monkey pox is a punishment) emerged as the most frequent cluster followed by احفاد قوم لوط (Descendants of Lot’s nation), الشواذ جدري القرود (Homosexual Monkey pox), جدري القرود لعنة (Monkey pox is a curse), عقاب من الله (punishment from God), للمثليين جدري القرود (Monkey pox is for homosexuals), لوط في عصرنا (Lot’s people of our times). The keywords identified from the clusters are punishment, descendants of Lot’s nation, curse, homosexuals, and Lot’s people.

To finalize the cluster analysis, Clusters Tool was run for SwinCor using the initial keyword انفلوانزا الخنازير. Figure 4 shows the identified clusters in the SwinCor.

Figure 4. Three-word clusters in SwinCor.

The identified terms from the clusters in SwinCor are انفلوانزا الخنازير (Swine flu) are عقاب من الله (Punishment from God), الخبائث (Malignant), النصارى (Christians), الدياثة (Cuckold), الزبالين (Scavengers), الصليبيين (Christians), الفاحشة (lewdness), القاذورات (Waste matter/filth), النجاسات (All that are considered filthy according to Islamic laws), المسيحيين (Christians), المعجزة الإسلامية (Miracle of Islam), كراهية الإسلام (Islamophobia), and عقوبة من الله (Punishment from God). The use of negative adjectives for Swine flu such as الخبائث (Malignant), القاذورات (Waste matter/filth), النجاسات (All that are considered filthy according to Islamic laws), and so on informs the semantic patterns that are typically connected to Islamic ideological teachings. While المعجزة الإسلامية (Miracle of Islam), كراهية الإسلام (Islamophobia) are the semantic patterns that justify the Islamic conceptualization of divine justice.

The Keyword Tool in AntConc was utilized to reconfirm the identified keywords in the lists of clusters across the sub-corpora. Furthermore, this tool generated the keyness frequencies and keyness effect in comparison with the reference corpus utilized in this study, which was a large corpus of Quranic text. The rationale for using Quranic text as the reference corpus was that it contained all the ideological terminologies and a vast repertoire of Arabic lexical items. The keyness analysis of the CovCor, MonCor, and SwinCor revealed that الله (God) showed the highest keyness effect in all the three sub-corpora, which computationally implied that CovCor was likely to contain 248 times more occurrences, MonCor was likely to have 95 times more occurrences, and SwinCor was likely to have 218 times more occurrences of the keyword الله when these corpora were extended to the word count of reference corpus. The semantic grouping of يأجوج, ماجوج, and يأجوج ومأجوج (Gog and Magog) emerged as the second highest keyness (189.36) in the CovCor, which showed the Muslim preachers’ belief of China as the land of Gog and Magog.

In MonCor, the second highest keyness emerged for the keywords للمثليين (88.59) and الشواذ (16.10) where both stood for homosexuals, implying that these lexical items will occur 88 times more and 16 times more when MonCor extends to the length of reference corpus. In SwinCor, the second highest keyness emerged for the English equal “Christians” for which three ideological terms, المسيحيين (18.93), الصليبيين (20.90) and النصارى (26.46), were used in the discourses. The third highest keyness in CovCor emerged from عقوبة (172.32) and عقاب (71.19) collectively as etymologically both are used for the English word “punishment”.

In CovCor, الأويجور (19.0), المسلمين (59.47), and الابرياء (24.0) collectively produced the fourth highest keyness, where the reason behind making a semantic grouping was that all the three lexical items represented the tortured entities in China according to the context of discursive patterns (see Figure 5), expressing that COVID-19 was a punishment from God to the cruel Chinese authorities due to the killings of innocent Muslims and Uyghurs. In MonCor, the third highest keyness emerged for احفاد (29.10) and لوط (36.10) which represented the homosexuals (see Figure 9). In SwinCor, والنجاسات (37.88), والنجس (18.46), حرام (50.56), and القاذورات (37.88) collectively represented the reason of God’s wrath and contained the third highest keyness. The keywords and respective keyness provided the description of the text across three sub-corpora by showing the analytical effect of religious scholars’ chosen lexical items in the construction of discourses. The analysis revealed that the constructed discourses on the pandemics were condensed in terms of ideological terminology related to the conceptualization of God in the Muslim faith and in terms of the excessive use of blame attributing terms as shown in Table 2.

Figure 5. Religious scholars’ use of ideological terms across three sub-corpora.

Table 2. Keyness of the keywords in CovCor, MonCor, and SwinCor

CovCor				MonCor				SwinCor
Keywords	Frequency	Keyness (Likelihood)	Keyness (Effect)	Keywords	Frequency	Keyness (Likelihood)	Keyness (Effect)	Keywords	Frequency	Keyness (Likelihood)	Keyness (Effect)
أعداء	4	38.032	0.013	احفاد	2	29.106	0.080	الإسلام	3	28.405	0.015
ابتلاء	5	33.766	0.014	الشواذ	1	16.106	0.080	لاوامر ا	2	9.465	0.012
الأويجور	2	19.014	0.012	للمثليين	9	88.595	0.307	الخبائث	4	37.880	0.016
البلاء	3	20.257	0.012	عقاب	2	32.303	0.148	الدياثة	3	28.405	0.015
التوبة	4	27.011	0.013	غضب	2	32.303	0.148	الصليبيين	2	20.904	0.013
الصين	8	55.470	0.026	لوط	5	36.106	0.180	القاذورات	4	37.880	0.016
الظالمة	3	28.523	0.012	الله	14	95.075	0.267	الله	23	218.511	0.237
المسلمين	9	59.476	0.037	عقوبة	6	40.368	0.186	المسلمين	3	28.405	0.015
عقاب	10	71.190	0.038					المسيحيين	2	18.934	0.013
غضب	16	109.520	0.043					المعجزة	2	9.465	0.012
تعذيب	12	91.324	0.020					النصارى	3	26.465	0.012
الله	41	248.86	0.260					حرام	7	50.567	0.097
الابرياء	3	24.041	0.012					عقاب	3	28.405	0.015
عقوبة	18	172.327	0.030					عقوبة	5	41.465	0.029
جنود	12	93.564	0.028					والنجاسات	4	37.880	0.076
يأجوج ماجوج	23	189.367	0.214					والنجس	2	18.465	0.022

The identification of three-word clusters and significant keywords across the three sub-corpora provided the organized set of rich information for the collocations and concordance lines analysis based on which the research question in this study are answered.

5.1. Framing ideological semantic patterns

Based on collocation analysis, the participant Muslims scholars’ discourses on the pandemics were interpreted in the light of emerged ideological semantic patterns. Firth (1957) conceptualized the term collocation which he defined as a word which co-occurs with certain other words regularly to produce a collective meaning in its respective context. The constituent words in a collocation are statistically relevant, and the relevance can be calculated using certain statistical measures such as Mutual Information (MI) to seek log-likelihood (Liu, 2020; Baker, 2014). This study also utilizes MI for log-likelihood at the minimum statistical significance P ≤ 0.05, which is the 95^th percentile. Using the advanced setting interface, collocates search was set at a window span of 5 L and 5 R, whereas minimum frequency was set to 4. The interface was engaged in three successive attempts to achieve collocates of the initial keywords فيروس كورونا (COVID-19), جدري القرود (Monkey pox), and انفلوانزا الخنازير (Swine flu) in CovCor, MonCor, and SwinCor, respectively. The generated results included high frequencies of articles, prepositions, and connecting words that were removed in the process of compiling three categories of collocates into a single table as shown in Table 3.

Table 3. Collocates for the three sub-Corpora CovCor, MonCor, and SwinCor

CovCor			MonCor			SwinCor
Collocates	Frequency	Likelihood	Collocates	Frequency	Likelihood	Collocates	Frequency	Likelihood
جنود	12	28.786	الله	29	17.098	المسيحيين	11	21.148
عقاب	27	25.098	عقاب	26	11.003	الله	11	21.148
ابتلاء	14	18.423	جدري	25	9.223	الدياثة	20	18.596
أعداء	15	22.057	للمثليين	11	28.753	المسلمين	20	18.596
البلاء	7	19.402	الشواذ	7	9.328	حرام	10	17.039
المسلمين	7	19.402	الطبيعة	7	9.328	الخبائث	9	13.314
غضب	9	16.300	احفاد	2	5.581	النصارى	9	13.314
الله	20	19.298	المثليين	6	15.581	عقاب	20	20.765
الصين	26	16.142	لوط	2	4.644	النجاسات	4	11.765
تعذيب	13	14.475				القاذورات	4	11.683
الظالمة	13	14.475				عقوبة	5	16.389
الأويجور	9	26.112
قتل	10	18.225
السلطات	4	15.871
يأجوج ماجوج	23	15.284

The collocation analysis in the sub-corpora was applied for two main reasons: first, it highlighted other terms within the terminology spectrum related to religious scholars’ perceptions of the pandemics, which otherwise might not emerge in the clusters analysis, and secondly, the semantic prosody was retraced by identifying the most frequent terms that collocated with the initial keywords for three sub-corpora.

Semantic prosody refers to the concept that “lexical items are accompanied by patterns of meanings that influence our understanding of the issue” (Zottola, 2018, p. 246). In this way, semantic prosody informs the connotational coloring of representation beyond lexical items by depicting the linguistic behavior (Baker, 2014; Firth, 1957; Partington, 1998). In CovCor, the initial keyword COVID-19 provided a different representation than the representations of COVID-19 in the widely disseminated discourses. The representation of COVID-19 in this study mainly involved ideological semantic patterns leading to the conceptualizations of the Muslim faith that can restrict its generalizability. The representation of COVID-19 when this lexical item accompanied different patterns of meanings such as dangerous, smart, lockdown, social distancing, wearing masks, vaccination doses, etc., depicted a different semantic prosody that may be acceptable and generalizable for the masses. The most frequent collocate of COVID-19 was عقاب (punishment) with a frequency of 27, second most frequent collocate remained الصين (China) with a frequency of 26, and يأجوج ومأجوج (Gog and Magog) emerged as third most frequent collocate with a frequency of 23 followed by الله (God) 20%, أعداء (enemies) 15% ابتلاء (affliction) 14% and جنود (soldiers) 12%. Three major semantic patterns of representation of the COVID-19 emerged: COVID-19 is the evil that originated from the land of Gog and Magog, COVID-19 is revenge and punishment from the God, and God sent this pandemic to punish enemies of God such as China. Slightly less frequent collocates such as الأويجور (Uyghurs), تعذيب (torture), قتل (killing), etc., provided the causal frame of Islamic ideology in which the cause of punishment from God was justified by framing the “wrath of God” in the context of torture on the Muslims and their killings in China. Furthermore, the semantic patterns showed that initially the Islamic ideological frame of Gog and Magog was frequently incorporated to the represent COVID-19 because the Islamic ideological frame of Gog and Magog as the symbol of evil is connected to the modern day countries of China and Russia. After the outbreak of COVID-19 in the Muslim countries, two semantic patterns prevailed in the Muslim preachers’ discourses: some offered the same rhetoric that the evil originating in the land of Gog and Magog was affecting the whole world, and the second semantic pattern presented the outbreak of COVID-19 in Muslim countries as a warning for the Muslims to repent, with an argument that they were left helpless due to their sins in front of Gog and Magog. Regarding the closure of Muslims’ two Holy Mosques due to COVID-19, Muslim scholars’ incorporated the ideological frame of Jews conspiracy against Islam which is part of another paper (see Hashmi et al., 2023).

Except the ideological frame of Gog and Magog in CovCor, an obvious similarity in terms of ideological conceptualization of the lexical items emerged between CovCor and MonCor where the semantic prosody led to the Muslim faith. For example, descendants of Lot’s nation is a unique ideological term used for the homosexuals in Islamic ideology, and the Muslim majority societies, in line with the Islamic faith, do not accept homosexuality. The most frequent collocate in the MonCor remained الله (God), with a frequency of 29, whereas عقاب (punishment) followed with a frequency of 26, and للمثليين (homosexuals) and الشواذ (homosexuals) with a collective frequency of 25 provided the ideological semantic patterns that represent Monkey pox as the punishment of God for homosexuals. Under the strong influence of ideology, the Muslim scholars perceived the pandemic of Monkey pox as a punishment by the God for the homosexuals, representing it in an ideological semantic prosody that made this discourse favorable for the Muslims and unfavorable for the non-Muslims.

The collocates that emerged from the SwinCor also presented the pandemic of Swine flu in an ideological semantic prosody where Islamic ideology about the conceptualization of Swine as a strictly prohibited entity to eat or even to touch it was incorporated. The lexical item الله (God) emerged as the second most frequent collocate of Swine flu. This lexical item also accompanied several other collocates and constituted the ideological frame of God’s wrath such as عقاب من الله (Punishment from God), عقوبة من الله (Punishment from God), and الله شديد العقاب (God is the most severe punisher). The ideological representation of Swine flu involved the stereotypical identity of the Christians in the religious authoritative discourse of Islam that uses the term النصارى for the Christians as a negatively attributed identity. Under the influence of Islamic ideology, religious scholars represented Swine flu as punishment from God for those who eat pork. Another semantic pattern of representation involved the most frequent collocate, المسلمين (The Muslims), where Muslims were urged to thank God and offer prayers for not catching the Swine flu because of avoiding pork as it is prohibited in Islam. In this way, the wrath of God was attributed to the Christians, and the Muslims were framed ideologically immune from Swine flu. In this way, the Muslim preachers’ discourses presented the Christians as the identified target of Swine flu. The similarity of ideological semantic prosody of the representation of Swine flu with the representations of COVID-19 and Monkey pox can be seen in the patterns of meanings attached that frame the conceptualization of “wrath of God” in accordance with the Muslim faith. This study drew the keyword plots for the three sub-corpora to understand the dispersion of certain ideological keywords across the three corpora which provided the insights into which pandemic was ideologically represented more than the others. The comparison of three plots is shown in Figure 5.

The comparison confirmed the more ideological representation of COVID-19 in the Muslim preachers’ discourses on social media than the other two pandemics. The occurrences of ideological terms showed that the discursive construction of COVID-19 by the Muslim preachers was ideologically condensed and thus, it seemed more influential in terms of semantic prosody.

5.2. Ideological representation of the pandemics

The Keywords in context (KWIC) tool was exploited to gain rich insights into the context of the emerged keywords that can eventually lead to the critical analysis of the socio-cultural practices underlying the constructed discourses (Baker, 2014; Zottola, 2018). KWIC analysis generated concordance lines containing all the occurrences of the keywords across CovCor, MonCor, and SwinCor that provided contextual insights into the corpus to answer the research question ‘how do the Muslim preachers in Arab countries incorporate ideological frames in the representation of the pandemics? The concordance lines of COVID-19 are shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Concordance lines for the keywords in CovCor.

The interface setting in AntConc shows fifteen lines on the face without needing to scroll down. In accordance with the identified keywords in the overall corpus of the three pandemics, the concordance lines were thoroughly probed, and the fifteen concordance lines related to COVID-19 were found covering all the keywords. Four main ideological frames emerged from the contexts of keywords related to COVID-19: situating the reasons of COVID-19 in the frame of Muslim faith, framing COVID-19 as a powerful evil coming from the land of Gog and Magog, framing COVID-19 as wrath of God, and framing the needed action in line with the Muslim faith.

Islamic ideology considers the disasters and mass destruction as the result of humans’ evil deeds (Al-Ghamdi, 2021; Hashmi et al., 2022). In case of the Muslims, ideological frame that God takes revenge of the Muslims from non-Muslims underlie the reasons of COVID-19 based on which the religious scholars believed the Muslims’ killings in China such as that of the Uyghurs, and in India and Iraq through military operations; disbelief of Islam; and insult to the Muslims as the reasons of God’s wrath and revenge for which God descended COVID-19. They argued that such mass destructive evil emerged in China which is the land of Gog and Magog, an obvious origin of evil in line with Islamic faith. The ideological frame of “God’s justice” worked behind the religious scholars’ discourse wherein they claimed that the target of COVID-19 are أعداء الله (Enemies of God) and especially the cruel Chinese authorities from where it started due to the Muslims’ mass killings. Muslim preachers incorporated the ideological frame of “God’s punishment” that implied the demand of an action which in Muslim faith is الله يستوجب التوبة (God demands repentance). Similarly, عقاب من الله (Punishment from God) and من الله ابتلاء (affliction from God) were the typical terms belonging to the ideological conceptualization of “wrath of God”. Figure 7 presents one such example of framing the wrath of God.

Figure 7. Ideological representation of COVID-19.

All these frames constituted the discourse practice in the Muslim community wherein the believers frequently use references from the Islamic authoritative discourses such as Quran and Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad in their naturally occurring language while discussing human sufferings and disasters (Al-Ghamdi, 2021; Hashmi et al., 2022). The socio-cultural practices among the Muslims include the role-based practices such as the religious scholars assume the role of teacher and preacher to remind the believers of submission to God and the omnipotence and omnipresence of God (K. Li & Zhang, 2022). Incorporating socio-cultural role, the religious scholars not only shared their views of the pandemics, but they also warned the non-Muslims of their conduct with the Muslims and Islam and urged the Muslims to repent and shun off the evils and sins. In line with these socio-cultural practices, COVID-19 was represented as the wrath of God. The concordance lines for the keywords that emerged from the discourses on Swine flu are shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Concordance lines for the keywords in SwinCor.

The concordance lines related to the Swine flu revealed three ideological frames incorporated in the light of the Islamic authoritative discourse. The Islamic ideology frames Swine as الخبائث (Malignant) and النجاسات (All that are considered filthy according to Islamic laws). This ideological frame portrayed those who eat Swine as الزبالين (Scavengers) who eventually had the habits of الدياثة (Cuckold) and الفاحشة (lewdness) developed in them. The religious scholars incorporated this ideological frame to identify the reasons and target of Swine flu. They discursively constructed Christians as the target of Swine flu for eating pork, which is strictly prohibited by God in Islamic ideology, wherein their discourse seemed attempting to frame God’s justice. Islamic authoritative discourse shapes the Muslims’ discursive practice of differentiating themselves from the non-believers (Hashmi et al., 2021) which framed the religious scholars repeated discourse patterns where they attributed Swine flu with the Christians and declared Muslims’ immunity from it for avoiding pork in line with God’s sanctions. Figure 9 presents an example of such representational semantic pattern.

Figure 9. Example of the representation of Swine flu.

The discursive construction of warning also involved some exceptional cases where the discourse presented the expression of “Muslims invited God’s wrath” such as in case of Tunisian president who منع الحج (banned the pilgrimage to Makkah) for his nation due to the fear of Swine flu and himself caught Swine flu as a punishment from God. The discursive construction by the Muslim preachers involved different representative semantic patterns for different ideologies. The difference of representative semantic patterns in case of Muslims emerged from the keywords in context such as من الله البلاء (trial from the God) was frequently used to warn the Muslims, whereas for the non-Muslims, عقاب من الله (punishment from God) and عقوبة من الله (Punishment from God) also implied the socio-cultural practice under the influence of Islamic ideology. Such ideological representations of the pandemics in other cultures may not agree with these ideological conceptualizations (see Al-Ghamdi, 2021).

Figure 10 presents the concordance lines of the emerged keywords in relation to representation of Monkey pox in the Muslim preachers’ discourses on social media.

Figure 10. Concordance lines for the keywords in MonCor.

The frequent ideological semantic pattern that emerged in the representation of Monkey pox is the Quranic story of Lot’s people who were punished for homosexuality. Though the global discourse on Monkey pox also related the emergence of Monkey pox initially to the Pride festival in Gran Canaria held by the LGBTs, later on medical scientists declared that anyone could get infected by this virus. It is a fact that sexually active gay and other men who have sex with men are more vulnerable to this current outbreak (DiGennaro et al., 2022). In this way stigmatization of LGBT’s festival in the social media provided the fundamental direction to the Arab Muslim scholars’ discourse on Monkey pox. The religious scholars seemed linking the initial global discourse to the ideological frame of exemplary disaster of Lot’s people as mentioned in the Islamic authoritative discourse of Quran and Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. Figure 11 presents an example of such ideological representation of Monkey pox.

Figure 11. Ideological representation of Monkey pox.

The semantic patterns of meanings framed God’s justice in punishing the LGBTs by incorporating the Quranic story of Lot’s people in which God has already told the punishment of this crime. Religious scholars here again attempted to frame the wrath of God ideologically by using specific lexical items from the Islamic ideology and framing an intertextual context under the influence of Islamic ideology. The frequent keywords such as عقاب من الله (punishment from God), لوط في عصرنا (Lot’s people of our times), and احفاد قوم لوط (Descendants of Lot’s nation) framed the conceptualization of wrath of God in line with the Muslim faith. The ideological representation and the framing of God’s wrath in MonCor was found similar to that of CovCor and swinCor which showed the strict and uniform canvas of Islamic ideological frame that was incorporated in the representation of pandemics and other wide scaled disasters.

These are the insights that the researchers have found out in the Muslim preachers’ pandemics related discourses on social media. This study can be viewed as an extension of the literature utilizing CDA and CL to explore the Muslims’ discourses within social media.

6. Conclusion

This study utilized a combination of CL methodology, Fairclough’s (1995) perspective, and framework of CDA to investigate the ideological representation of COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox by Arab Muslim preachers on social media. By aligning the results of different tools to the levels of the CDA framework, this study aimed to provide insights into the communication strategies used by Muslim preachers to inform the masses about these pandemics and to show the value of this approach for generating a deeper understanding of the discourses at play. This study addressed a research gap by analyzing the representation of pandemics in the discourses of Muslim preachers on social media. By doing so, it extends the existing literature on the topic. The analysis revealed that there were semantic patterns of blame attribution to non-Muslims, such as the Chinese government, Christians, and homosexuals, as well as to Muslims for their sins, which were identified as the causes of the outbreak of pandemics. The discursive practices of the Muslim preachers in this study were found to be embedded in the authoritative Islamic discourse of Quran and Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad, and the socio-cultural practices of teaching, preaching, and justifying Muslim faith were identified as the driving force in the construction of discourses on the pandemics. The analysis of all three sub-corpora revealed a consistent pattern of incorporating ideological frames of human crime such as disbelief in Islam, targeted humans such as disbelievers of Islam, and punishment from God, as represented by COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox. The ideology of Gog and Magog has emerged as a unique framing for COVID-19, portraying the pandemic as an evil originating from the land of Gog and Magog and attributed to China. This framing aligns with the conceptualizations of wrath of God in Islamic ideology. However, this study’s limitations suggest a need for further research focusing on common Muslims’ other than preachers, discourses related to pandemics to gain deeper and more generalizable insights into the collective Muslim standpoint regarding such outbreaks. Additionally, this may help provide a more nuanced understanding of how Islamic ideology is invoked and interpreted during times of crisis.

Acknowledgments

This study is supported via funding from Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, project number (PSAU/2023/R/1444).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the This study is supported via funding from Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University project number PSAU/2023/R/1444 [PSAU/2023/R/1444].

Notes on contributors

Abdulfattah Omar

Abdulfattah Omar is an Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of English, College of Science & Humanities, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University (KSA). Also, he is a standing Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Port Said University, Egypt. Dr. Omar received his PhD degree in computational linguistics in 2010 from Newcastle University, UK. His research interests include computational linguistics, literary computing, and digital humanities.