Abstract
This article discusses the strategy of intimidation and humiliation in Al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf al-Thaqafῑ’s most famous speech delivered in the city of Kufa in Iraq in the seventh century. The linguistic devices used by Al-Ḥajjāj are analyzed by applying the theory of Critical Discourse Analysis. This approach reveals his rhetoric of intimidation, humiliation, and emotional manipulation, reflecting Al-Ḥajjāj’s intention to act with extreme cruelty against the Kufa rebels. In this speech, he strove to normalize and legitimize violence against the rebels, for example, by likening the inhabitants of Kufa to animals, thereby framing the beheading and slaughtering of them as normal, in the way that animal slaughter is perceived as normal behavior.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Writer and participant visibility in quantitative and qualitative research: a corpus-assisted study of human agent verbs in health science publications
- Speaker positioning in academic instruction: insights from corpus analysis
- The most common graphicons in Mexican Spanish speaking WhatsApp communities composed of school parents
- A multimodal contrastive analysis of regulations and instructions during the COVID-19 lockdown in the context of the Island of Madeira and the United Kingdom
- Conative “kisses” in human-to-animal communication
- Ecological discourse analysis and meaning interpretation of BBC news reports on 2019 Australian bushfires from the perspective of transitivity system
- ‘Where there is a will there is a way’: figurative language use and its pragmatic functions in political discourse
- Undergraduate and postgraduate students’ emails to faculty members: an impoliteness perspective
- Apology strategies in Tashelhit: linguistic realization and religious influence
- Al-Ḥajjāj’s rhetoric of intimidation and humiliation