Language of Religion 3000 words

AUGMENTATION

INTRODUCTION

Religion has perhaps the most persuasive rhetoric. Religions that do not have the persuasive power cannot withstand the onslaught of other religions with more persuasive power and die an early death. Language, powerful persuasion, believable reasoning and logic of uncommon strength in the form of religious language, have shown the courage to cut across deeply held earlier beliefs to introduce a new faith and worship. It is not easy to completely erase one faith that a person has inherited and replace it by another faith, which, at that point, could look radical and adventurous, especially in the presence of opposition and ridicule from others. The linguistic study of Deedat’s The Choice is one such rare work that is based on the rhetoric of persuasion in the religious debate. This study intends to go through the religious language, especially in The Choice and the main focus will be on the linguistic analysis, language peculiarities, metaphor, structure, textual repeating and imagery of this work. Power of the language changes beliefs, negotiates with the mental attitudes and religious debates actually target this changeable attitude of the person based on the argumentative analysis of the new faith. The main thrust here will be on the debate between Islam and Christianity in The Choice.

HYPOTHESIS

This research will attempt to establish the authenticity of persuasion in religious discourse and value its consistency of language. It will try to find the linguistic persuasion in terms of lexis and syntax in the religious debate. It will try to establish that certain formats meant to influence the audience are used in religious arguments. The study will try to recognise such formats. The study will also focus on the moves and acts of structure of arguments. It will take the assumption that the language of persuasion in religious discourse is very different from the usual language of literary world as the basis of this research. Based on this assumption, it will analyse the religious discourses of other religions apart from Islam; but it will concentrate more on The Choice, Volume 1. The study will try to find out the differences between religious language and other languages of usage under normal circumstances where religious impressionism is not the target.

PURPOSE

The purpose of the study is mainly identifying, analysing the lexical and syntactic features that create argumentative structures in religious texts and debates to understand the power of persuasion in the language that could sway people from one faith to another. In a religiously divided society of today’s world, I am sure it is necessary to know more about the religious texts and other recent works to understand their psychological impact and power of persuasion. Argumentative religious discourse that voices the tenets of Islam mainly targets non-Muslims and people who are unfamiliar with Arabic language. Such discourses use English as the language of communication and the Dawaa speakers and writers need a learned audience. Religious discourse is a field where much research has not been conducted till today. It is necessary to conduct serious research from the language point of view, because despite being an extraordinarily interesting field of possible research, it has remained almost untouched for years now. I am sure that it is necessary to give attention to the various highly interesting linguistic forms that are touted in the religious discourses, find their reason of existence there and the way they captivate human minds, cajole them and lull them to accept an entirely unknown religion which they might have disliked at one point or other. Here the language is connected with the listener’s psychological impact and its depth and hence, attains major significance.

METHODOLOGY

The present research will adopt an eclectic model called Factor Analysis (Biber, 1988) model to investigate the repeated lexical and syntactic occurrences in the religious debates portrayed in The Choice. It will depend upon the theories of Halliday (1994) and Hatim (1991) to explore the organisational structure of the arguments. It will employ Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) model to explore sequence (These models were picked up from the file you have uploaded, thinking that you needed these to be mentioned. As you had mentioned these theories, you must be knowing about them already. Sequence interaction is fine) interaction and any significant patterning. It will painstakingly go through the language of The Choice, trying to apply the above models and many other models advocated by linguistic scholars. It will try to find out the similarities and differences between discourses of one religion from another. Here, the main focus will be on Christianity and Islam. But this does not mean that other religions like Hinduism, Buddhism etc. are completely overlooked. This will be a diligent research depending on every variety in language nuances.

LIMITATIONS

The research is of a limited scope, as it will concentrate mainly on one book, especially, on the debate between Islam and Christianity in volume one of Deedar’s work. Hence, its field is rather curtailed. It will definitely look into other discourses of not only Islam and Christianity; still the main focus of the study is narrowed down by aiming at the discourse in one single work. Actually speaking, language study of religious discourses could be an area of unlimited research for the future. It is just making a timid initiation now, and the current study is one of the attempts in that direction. It cannot make any pretensions that it would be able to achieve much ground. Still it will be a commendable effort in the direction of researching a potentially significant field that might give way to many more researches of the kind. But right now, the study is venturing into a limited field where the fresh ground is yet to be broken by serious research.

The work will also take help from the already conducted research, reports, journal articles and books. It has to depend on desk research for secondary source which attains prominence in the absence of primary sources like interviews or any other forms of communication.

SUMMARY

Factor Analysis “is the most comprehensive objective study ever undertaken of variation across representative genres of speech and writing” http://www.jstor.org/view/00031283/ap020144/02a00100/0, where Biber arrives at six dimensions of textual variations: Involved v. informed production, narrative v. non-narrative concerns, Explicit v situation-dependent references, Overt expression of persuation, Abstract v. non-abstract information and online informational elaboration (Ibid).

Halliday and Hatim (I took this from your file and naturally you must be knowing about this theory) is about the way arguments and counter-arguments are posed against one another and the distinctive way in which it is done in different types of texts.

LITERATURE REVIEW

As mentioned earlier, religious discourse has not received much research attention especially in the fields of attitudes and language and it is surprising that field of such vast research potential had been ignored by the scholars till now. It is generally known that the language in religious debates and discourses is distinctly different from the language usage found in any other literature arena, because the purpose of the language in the discourse is very different from the purpose of other usages, and this language, in its own way, is extraordinarily important. “As many observers have noted language is so central to humans’ experience of the supernatural that the sacred language itself often takes on the same sanctity and taboos that are associated with the spiritual entities to which that language refers,” Greene and Rubin (1991, p.81).

Marvelling at the structure of religious discourses in various religions, Wittgensteirn says:” The individual expression in language name objects – sentences are combinations of such names. – In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. (Wittgenstein 1953: 1).

The main model that will be used in this research investigation comes from Biber, who said: “dimensions are bundles of linguistic features that co-occur in texts because they work together to mark some common underlying function” (1988, p. 55). This model will be applied to find more about the language structure in the said work of Deedar.

Two other important theorists who will be followed in this research are Halliday and Hatim. Halliday argues that “the staging structure of this genre consists of, at minimum, a thesis stage followed by a number of argument stages, and that persuasion usually involves the negotiation of propositions”(in Muntigl 4). According to Hatim, argumentative texts take the form of through-argument and counter-argument, each of which has certain characteristics and types of their own, mainly intended to change the attitudes of the target group.

Even though the research in this region is surprisingly limited, it does not mean that this literature is totally bereft of all the research attempts. There are many studies conducted on the language of religion, on one hand, and others conducted on the persuasive function of speech on the other, although they do not envelope the hypothesis in its entirety. Crystal and Davy (1969, p.165) in their commendable work, identify different kinds of religious languages, amongst which liturgical and biblical languages are given prominence. “The vocabulary of religious English is extremely distinctive, and its analysis produces several very clear types,” they opined. Some sociologists have found similarity in language between some highly persuasive and not yet definite fields of politics and the religious discourse. In one such attempts that could establish the similarity between present day political and calculated effort and the ancient and modern religious discourses, Peter Muntigle, in his “A systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis of EU Employment Policy” argues that the EU employment policy is a form of discourse that functions to erase the national policies to replace them with the international policies within the European Union. Here the EU still has the hesitancy in its approach not knowing how the member states will react and hence, the language of persuasion touches the rhetoric of policies.

As religious discourses come in all the languages of the world, it is important to know how the pattern is used in different languages. It is important to find out how structure, lexis, patterns and word matrix are used in various languages to impress more and more people, covering as many diversities as possible. “Since religious discourse is a separate unique language game different from that of science religious statements, unlike scientific ones, are not empirically testable…..Because the meaning of a term varies from one language game to another, to understand religious language one must see it from within the religious language game itself,” Martin (1990, p.256). This is important for the current study, as it will attempt to probe into the similarities of the style and structure in various languages of religious debate. There has always been an element of similarity in all the religions that are used against the most gullible of humans to win them over and spread the faith. This similarity of language will have a major psychological impact. Social scientists and linguistic experts have focused more on the metaphorical interpretation of religious discourse in the research already done, which is surely inadequate for the field of this kind. “In the extended sense of metaphor employed above, therefore, we are witnessing in theology a return to metaphorical interpretation of religious discourse; but it is a metaphorical hermeneutic of a highly sophisticated form”.

http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv3-24

In spite of the many ruling concepts in this research field, some scholars are reluctant to submit the religious discourse to any conceptual framework, and limit its scope. They think that the impact of the religion is not limited only to the concepts; instead, its applicable could be much vaster. “Conceptual frameworks come and go. This does not mean that we should not try to understand the very meaning of the God of Israel and the God of Jesus, but that we have to look for another conceptuality, one that will take into account all that we know about the world in which we live”, (Van der Vekken 1992: 163).

DISCUSSION

“In Arabic the word is DEEN (Way of Life), to supersede all, whether it be Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianism, Judaism, Communism or any other ”ISM”. This is the destiny of Allah’s Deen,” Mohummed (pbuh) The Greatest (p.134). It is important for a researcher to focus on this kind of language which is exclusive as well as inclusive. This style of language has focus only on one religion, here, Islam, and negates the influence of all other religions, by belittling and subtly insulting them as inferior to Islam. The structure of such language has powerful impact on the audience, by relegating all the other ‘isms’ into remote background and this is the work and language of religious rhetoric. This is not done only in Islam. Almost all the languages employ this style when they eulogise themselves at the expense of all other languages. Self-praise, self-importance, and self-glorification is necessary for every language to cast its spell on audience and this cannot be done without the help of stylistic metaphors and exclusive language. Many commentators today argue that religious language is metaphorical (Barbour, 1974; Brown, 1982; Frye, 1981; MacCormac, 1976; Tillich, 1959; Van Noppen, 1991).

Conceptualising religious discourses has always been difficult, because of their mercurial quality. It is important to note that the religious vocabulary is absolutely different from other vocabularies. It is also important to note that in spite of every religion having its own vocabulary world, religious vocabulary, irrespective of which religion they belong to, has a certain, very clear resemblance. If these resemblances could be codified, it would be an exemplary research work in the field of religious rhetoric. Literature gestures have their own aspects of cultural transmissions. Textual traditions and use of metaphor usually reflect the very core of that particular religion. Thematizing those metaphors with associated paradoxes and probing how they keep the traditional outlook intact is important in studies of this kind.

Martin Luther, who is even today, respected as the first literalist, said explaining the literal meaning of religious language: “[n]o violence is to be done to the words of God, whether by man or angel; but they are to be retained in their simplest meaning wherever possible, and to be understood in their grammatical and literal sense unless the context plainly forbids, lest we give our adversaries occasion to make a mockery of all the Scriptures” (1982, p.189). In addition, it is necessary to accept that religious discourses have their own language peculiarities. Almost all the scholars agree that there is a certain oddity involved in the religious language to make it more authentic and persuasive. “The oddity is caused by the fact that language which purports to be about God inevitably involves words whose meaning would seem to derive from the world of our experience; whereas a world-transcendent God is not within the range of what we can possibly experience” Harrison (2007, p.3). There is no doubt that the persuasive language is the main event in any religious discourse. It is a matter of significance to find how listeners react to such discourses, what kinds of changes go on in their minds while listening, and how they react to such changes and to what extent, language and its usage is responsible for such impressions. It is also a research that probes into the listeners’ response to the language style and how these styles have been used to the maximum possible impact on the listener. It is interesting to know how the modern revisions have impacted the traditional language in the field, whether it has changed the language style at all, and if so, how much and to what extent the audience reaction has improved or reduced or remained constant.

The work of Deedar, The Choice, presents an entirely different perspective, hitherto, unexplored in the religious history of Islam and Christianity. He argues that Mohammed the Prophet is the legitimate inheritor of Jesus Christ’s mangle. He says even their names mean almost the same. In a way, he is trying to argue that Islam has taken over Christianity from the moment it got shaped by Mohammed. He is trying to impress upon the ‘non-believers’ that Islam should be looked at as a better religion which is also an improved version of Christianity. This part of the debate where both the religions are mentioned and argued upon, will be explored for linguistic style of acute persuasion in the current research work.

CONCLUSION

There cannot be any religion without followers. Even the most unassuming and unambitious religions like Buddhism and Jainism too have their own followers. Both started and encouraged by princes who became saints in their religious pursuits, had extensive ‘conversion’ or better put as ‘persuasion’ programmes in the initial stages, where we hear discourses, especially by Buddha, which convinced kings and commoners alike. If such passive religions could be based on the religions preaching, one can only assume the aggressive religious discourse that extremely active religions like Christianity and Islam must have had during their inceptions. Understanding the language, style, use of psychologically brainwashing and persuasively impressive language made these religions famous. In these days of religious misunderstandings and hatred, understanding more about these religions could be helpful in more than one ways.

This research attempts to fill the obvious gap in the field of religious literature research from the linguistic point of view. I would like to argue that research on this area is not only necessary, but also important to understand more about religions. I would also argue that being a neglected area of research, this particular topic has immense potential of further research in the future. By initiating research on such a rather neglected topic, I am sure, the subject will be more benefited by attention of the scholars being drawn into it. I am sure that it is a highly beneficial topic of research with future possibilities in the field. It would like to reiterate that there is a profound gap in the research of the above topic, as much has not been achieved till now. This study will be one such effort to fill this research gap, which might possibly pave the way to further investigative research in the field. This research, I am sure, cannot be a futile attempt.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Greene, Kathryn and Rubin, Donald L., ‘Effects of Gender Inclusive/Exclusive Language in Religious Discourse,’ Journal of Language and Social Psychology 1991; 10; 81.
Harrison, V.S., ‘Metaphor, religious language and Religious Experience’, Sophia: International Journal for Philosophy of Religio, 46(2):pp. 127-145.
Martin, Michael (1990), Atheism, A Philosophical Justification, Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
Muntigle, Peter.”Policy, Politics, and social control :A SFL analysis of EU employment Policy” SAGES journal online. URL. sagepub.com
Luther, Martin, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Works of Martin Luther (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1982), volume 2, p. 189.
Van der Vekken, J. 1992. The referent of the word “God”. Tradition and Renewal. A. Boileau & J. A. Dick (eds.). Louvain: Leuven University Press, pp. 162–173.
Wierzbicka, A. 1995. Kisses, bows and handshakes. Semiotica, 103
Wittgenstein puts it in his Philosophical Investigations, that 1953: 1) Oxford: Basil Blackwell

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