Examining form and pattern of ‘ulama’ in western media: a corpus-aided discourse analysis approach

Al Umami, Habiba and Irham, Irham ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9222-230X (2021) Examining form and pattern of ‘ulama’ in western media: a corpus-aided discourse analysis approach. In: Literacies, Culture and Society towards Industrial revolution 4.0. Nova Science Publisher, Inc, New York, pp. 229-250. ISBN 978-1-53618-963-6 UNSPECIFIED : UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

There have been many studies on Islam and Muslim worlds but ulama is almost unexplored. This paper aims to fill in the gap on how Islam and Muslims in general are represented by taking one of prominent elements in Islam, ulama, that has a religious authority and that represents Muslim integrity in general. This study used wide corpus to shed light on collocations of the word ulama in the corpora, followed by meticulous concordance analysis in iWeb, NOW, GloWbe, COCA, and COHA, with more than 20 billion words in total. In addition to corpus linguistics as main method, this study also employed discourse analysis to examine patterns used with ulama and its collocation in the corpora. The results show that the word ulama appeared more than 7000 times across the corpora with only COHA corpus reported the lowest frequency (8 times only). The word ulama in this study is represented in a more positive manner compared to that of Islam and Muslims like in earlier studies did. It collocates with scholar, religious, leader, chief, council and some other nouns related to nations, for instance, Indonesia, Indonesian, Malaysia, Iran or Iranian, India, Philippines, Egypt, and Arab. The findings also demonstrate that negative representation of Islam and Muslims, which raised Islamophobia after the 9/11 terrorist actions, is not necessarily in line with the representation of Islam and Muslims through the word ulama in the western media discourse.

Item Type:	Book Section
Keywords:	corpus linguistics; discourse analysis; Islam; Muslim; ulama representation
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities > Department of English Language and Letters
Depositing User:	Habiba Al Umami
Date Deposited:	10 Nov 2021 11:13

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