Abstract:
This article uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) in order to analyse the discussion of the Muslim
dress code (commonly referred to as the hijab) on Al Jazeera’s religious talk show A-Shari’a wal
Hayat. Between 1998 and 2003, several episodes dealt with the Turkish and French ban and the
‘issue’ of the headscarf, most of them hosting prominent religious scholar Youssef Qaradawi.
Drawing mostly on Fairclough’s critical analytical approach to the media, I will examine, at the
micro- or local level, key linguistic strategies and rhetorical arguments deployed by participants
(mostly Qaradawi, and to a lesser extent, hosts and viewers) in order to justify their position
concerning the nature of the Muslim dress code. This in depth textual/local analysis will be
supplemented with a brief analysis at the macro- or global level, which will look at the overall
structure of these episodes in order to see the extent to which dominant positions privileged by
participants at the micro level are also reinforced by the superstructure of the episodes
themselves. Throughout, an intertextual analysis will be used in order to study which religious
discourses from the larger socio-cultural context are drawn upon in Al-Jazeera’s discussion of the
hijab. The purpose of this multi-levelled analysis is to answer the following questions: Which
religious discourses on the hijab are privileged by those talk shows? Are there any differences in
the range of opinions covered by the various episodes dealing with the same issue? How are the
various positions, when they exist, manifested at the local/global levels of analysis? Most
importantly, what do these discussions on the hijab tell us about Al-Jazeera’s self-confessed
editorial line (‘the opinion and the other-opinion’) concerning one of the most controversial
religious topics for Muslims?
