Interdiscursivity between political and religious discourses in a speech by Sadat

Abstract

Religion and politics have a complicated relationship in the Arab world. Interdiscursivity within political speeches between religious and political discourses is a manifestation of this complexity. This article argues that this sort of interdiscursivity imposes hard restrictions on the responses of Muslim addressees. Muslims’ responses to Islamic sacred texts are inherently restricted because disagreement with divine texts amounts to heresy. Accordingly, their responses to political speeches that present themselves as semi-religious texts are highly restricted as well. I will analyze a speech by the late Egyptian president Sadat to show how potential and actual responses could be controlled by creating intertextual links with the Qur’an and adopting the genre of Islamic religious sermons. I combine analytical tools from critical discourse analysis and what I refer to as “addressee rhetoric” to investigate the relationship between interdiscursivity and addressee response.