A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Treatise on Rights ‘Risalat Al-Huquq’ of Imam Al-Sajjad

This study aims at analysing two texts which are highly concerned with the issue of rights, namely, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was adopted and proclaimed in 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations and Treatise on Rights ‘Risalat Al-Huquq’ written by Imam Ali Al-Sajjad (p.b.u.h.)

Due to the dominating non-human actions in the world, appealing to rights has become a central concern of all humans. As such, to bridge the gap between the idea, cultivation, and conventions of human rights on the one hand and their realistic application on the other has been of an extreme importance. Therefore, the study aims at analysing two texts which are highly concerned with the issue of rights, namely, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was adopted and proclaimed in 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations and Treatise on Rights ‘Risalat Al-Huquq’ written by Imam Ali Al-Sajjad (p.b.u.h.) a principal figure in Islam and the fourth imam of Shias in the 7th century. The analysis will be carried out using an analytical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. Specifically speaking, the aims of the study are: investigating the linguistic structure of the texts selected, exploring them with respect to four interpretative procedures, and explicating their ideologies. Consequently, it is hypothesised that the texts selected although differ as to their linguistic structure, the texts that intertextually they accord with, the speech acts they employ, and their ideologies. Such an analysis reveals the linguistic as well as ideological perspectives in which rights are presented in these two texts. This, consequently, leads to the identification of power in these texts which can be mainly achieved by the “ideological workings of language”, as proposed by Fairclough (1989: 2).

Bibliographic Information

Title: A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Treatise on Rights ‘Risalat Al-Huquq’ of Imam Al-Sajjad

Author(s): Noor Othman

Published in: AL-AMEED Quarterly Adjudicated Journal

 Language: English

Length: 35 page

A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Treatise on Rights ‘Risalat Al-Huquq’ of Imam Al-Sajjad