A critical analysis of the salafis' ideological discourse on facebook and its identity significance

Abstract EN

The present research is a qualitative, critical study of the Salafis' unofficial ideological discourse on Facebook and its identity significance.

It aims at investigating the linguistic and discursive strategies employed by some Salafis to generate their discourse on Facebook, with focus on the lexical and text-generating techniques.

Given the nature and objectives of the research, Fairclough's critical discourse analysis approach was adopted in the study, and Van Djik's ideological square model was employed in the analysis and interpretation of the data.

Data was collected systematically, targeting Facebook posts - with ideological content - published by the Salafis on their profiles, pages or groups.

Results showed that the Salafis' ideological discourse was of two kinds: discourse of opposition and discourse of allegiance.

These are the equivalents of Van Djik's polarisation: Us equals positive vs.

Them equals negative.

In generating such a discourse, the Salafis used two innovative techniques: creation of new labelling terms through lexical modification, and multimodal text-generating techniques.

Moreover, it was found that this type of discourse functions as a practice of identity negotiation and membership alignment among the Salafis.

The present research proved that social media offers users the opportunity of creating their own discourses using creative techniques.

This has implications for the new research arenas of critical discourse analysis (CDA).