Ideological collocation and the recontexualization of Wahhabi-Saudi Islam post-9/11: A synergy of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This study proposes what is termed a ‘methodological synergy’ (Baker et al., 2008) of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA) for exploring how clashing ideologies have been actualized at collocation level across opposing discourses on Wahhabi-Saudi Islam/Wahhabism since 9/11. The discursive competition over Wahhabi-Saudi Islam reached a new extreme in the USA, when the 9/11 attacks called attention to ‘Islamic puritanical movements known as Wahhabism and Salafiyya’ (Blanchard, 2007). In this article, I argue that such discursive competition has linguistically crystallized via the biased collocations that permeate antagonistic texts, which recontextualize the same discourse topic of Wahhabi-Saudi Islam. This has eventually led to the emergence of ‘meaningful antagonism’ (Macdonell, 1986)¹ between anti-Wahhabi and pro-Wahhabi discourses since 9/11. One striking instance of these collocation-based representations can be clearly found in two polemical books, the first of which was published immediately after 9/11: Stephen Schwartz’s (2002) The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror. The second came out as a reaction to the attacks against Wahhabi Islam and Saudi Arabia: Natana DeLong-Bas’s (2004) Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. Thus, the article attempts to answer the following overarching question: how has Wahhabi-Saudi Islam been ideologically recontextualized across post-9/11 opposing discourses via collocation? There are two methodological procedures towards answering this question. First, employing a corpus method, I have statistically extracted the key words of the two texts under analysis, so that the different textual foci in each can be recognized; and then computed the collocates of the relevant key words (WAHHABI, WAHHAB’S and SAUDI). Second, using CDA tools, I have examined the contrastive lexico-semantic relations holding between the collocates of these key words in and/ or across the two texts, in terms of ‘textual synonymy’ (Fairclough, 2001) on the one hand, and oppositional paradigms (e.g. euphemism vs. dysphemism) on the other. Regarding the findings of the present study, combing corpus methods and CDA has opened up new horizons of the critical study of collocations at theoretical and methodological levels. First, collocational relations can ideologically contribute to the recontexualization of one discourse topic across clashing texts. Second, statistically significant collocations can precisely reveal opposing discursive voices or textual tones towards the same or similar topics. Last, there has become an ever-growing need for CDA people to build qualitatively on more reliably quantified textual features, especially when it comes to collocations.