Concepts of Rhetoric in the Analysis of Hadith Discourse: A study in perception and procedure

Abstract

This research is based on the assumption that Arabic rhetorical theory has the potentials and capabilities that enable it to renew itself every now and then, due to its intersection with other fields of knowledge. However, one can realize that the scientific contributions made by the late rhetoricians are limited to division, establishment of terminology, giving examples, explaining texts, and placing footnotes on texts without considering other research paths and exploiting their data. This is what affected negatively the path of Arabic rhetoric research.

This research therefore investigates the concepts of rhetoric among the Hadith scholars in three stages, namely, before the appearance of rhetorical works, after the codification and pre and post-Sakkaki stage, where rhetoric was divided into three branches, preceded by an introduction to rhetoric. This study also investigated another important aspect, that is, connection of rhetoric concepts among hadith scholars to the mechanisms they employed in analyzing Hadith, where emphasis is shifted to linguistic elements in their structural aspects i.e. the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactical and semantic ones, and then connecting these with non-linguistic factors produced by the position of communication context.