Divine Story Telling As Self Presentation: An Analysis Of Sūrat Al Kahf

discourse the speaker “can observe his interlocutor and, if he wishes to, modify what he is sayingto make it more accessible or acceptable to his hearer. The writer has no access to immediatefeedback.”10 This integral characteristic of spoken discourse is evident in the form of aninteraction between God and the first recipients of the Qur’ān. In a famous account of the reasonfor revelation of an āya in Sūrat al Aḥzāb, ‘The Joint Forces,’ it is narrated that a woman went tothe Prophet and complained by saying “Oh Messenger of God, women are disappointed and at aloss!' He said, 'How is that?' She replied, 'they are not mentioned [in the Qur'ān] with regard togood as are men.”11 Following this concern, it is reported that āya 35 of this sūra was revealed.12Here, God mentions the rewards for both believing women and men in a style overtly marked bythe repetitive usage of the feminine form:13For men and women who are devoted to God–believing men and women, obedient men and women, truthfulmen and women, steadfast men and women, humble men and women, charitable men and women, fastingmen and women, chaste men and women, men and women who remember God often–God has preparedforgiveness and a rich reward. [Q 33:35]This is one example where God is ‘listening’ to his addressees and incorporates their immediateconcerns into the Qur’ān. The incident illustrates the socially interactive and evolving nature, inits inception, of the Qur’ān, similar to spoken discourse.The style of Qur’ānic discourse also contains many features that are recently beingconsidered as features of spoken discourse as well. For example, Deborah Tannen identifiescertain linguistic strategies such as the use of repetition, imagery/details and dialogue, which10Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 5.‘Alī ibn Aḥmad Al Wāhidī, Asbāb ul nuzūl (Riyadh: Dār ul Mīmān, 2005), 569.12Ibid.13Translations in this study are taken from M.A.S Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an: A New Translation (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005). An āya is a Qur’ānic verse whose more accurate translation is a ‘sign,’ the is plural āyāt‘signs.’ Also, please note that all italicizations within the Qur’ān translations are mine to highlight various details Iam pointing out.115

have been traditionally thought of as quintessentially “literary,” as ubiquitous conversational‘involvement strategies.’ Speakers primarily use these involvement strategies to createinterpersonal involvement.14 Such linguistic strategies exist throughout the Qur’ān and especiallyin Qur’ānic narratives and can therefore also be understood as conversational involvementstrategies. A few examples of repetition that stand out are in the narratives of The Journey ofMoses, with the occurrence of five repeated usages of the ‘We’ pronoun in a single short āya,and in The Young Men of the Cave with the occurrence of a repeated emphasis on the secondperson pronoun, you, in āya 18. In this same āya God also presents a detailed image, alsocommon to Qur’ānic narratives, which functions as an involvement strategy. The listeners arebrought into an intimate scene of what the inside of the cave looked like while the young menwere sleeping it.152.Discourse Analysis and NarrativeTherefore in considering Qur’ān as spoken discourse, I analyze Qur’ānic narratives withthe theoretical and methodological tools of discourse analysis, a discipline that takes spokendiscourse as its area of study. Discourse analysis is a field transparent in its approach and aim:the study of language beyond the sentence.16 This study has been historically undertaken by twobroad methodological approaches. The first linguist to coin the term “discourse analysis” was14Deborah Tannen, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1.15Q 18:65: “And [they] found one of Our servants–a man to whom We had granted Our mercy and whom We hadgiven knowledge of Our own;” Q 8:18: “You would have thought they were awake, though they lay asleep. Weturned them over, to the right and the left, with their dog stretching out its forelegs at the entrance. If you had seenthem, you would have turned and run away, filled with fear of them.” I have italicized the repeated pronouns in theseāyāt to make them easier to recognize. Another example of repetition from this same narrative is that the plot of thestory is described twice, once in the beginning in short summary form and then in full form.16Tannen, Talking Voices, 5.6

Zellig Harris who defined discourse as “the next level in a hierarchy of morphemes, clauses, andsentences.”17 His approach was strictly structural, based on the analysis and classification ofunits of language. According to Schiffrin, “structurally based analyses of discourse findconstituents that have particular relationships with one another and that can occur in a restrictednumber of (often rule governed) arrangements.”18Later definitions of discourse analysiscontinue to maintain this emphasis. For example, Stubbs emphasizes “larger linguistic units”over the pragmatic function. In his definition, discourse analysis:attempts to study the organization of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore tostudy larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts. It follows that discourseanalysis is also concerned with language in use in social contexts, and in particular with interaction ordialogue between speakers.19The other major approach to studying discourse is functional. Within this approach, thediscourse analyst is “committed to an investigation of what language is used for,” and looks athow speakers construct linguistic messages for their addressees.20 As such, studies under thisapproach often draw on a number of other disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, andsociology. This dimension of discourse analysis is exemplified by Brown and Yule’s definition:the analysis of discourse is, necessarily, the analysis of language in use. As such, it cannot be restricted tothe description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes or functions which those forms are designedto serve in human affairs.21This approach takes into consideration the broader functional level of what speakers do withlanguage and how they do it through various linguistic strategies and underlying structures ratherthan focusing on sentence level meaning or grammar. Schiffrin says that analysts adapting this17Zellig Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).Deborah Schiffrin, Approaches to Discourses (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994), 24.19Michael Stubbs, Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1983), 1.20Brown and Yule, Discourse Analysis, 1.21Ibid.187

approach focus on “the way patterns of talk are put to use for certain purposes in particularcontexts and/or how they result from the application of communicative strategies.”22 From thisperspective, discourse is essentially an intersection of language and context.An excellent example of spoken discourse that clearly reflects the intersection oflanguage and context is narrative. The study of spoken narrative has become increasinglyprevalent within the field of discourse analysis so much that it has generated a new andinterdisciplinary field called narrative analysis.The analysis of spoken narratives in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis owes much toprevious models of narrative analysis that came either from literary studies, represented by‘narratologists’ such as Chatman (1969) and Prince (1973, 1982), who mainly described writtenand fictional narratives, or from folklore studies, exemplified by Propp (1968) who studiedRussian folktales.23 The narratologist model, for example, seeking to formulate the structure and“grammar” of a story, dismissed conversational narratives and other forms of naturally occurringnarrative as insignificant to the study of the novel and other literary types of narration.24Fludernik believes that this dismissal resulted in the failure of the field of narratology torecognize the “common narrative essence underlying both natural and literary storytelling.”25 Inher seminal analysis of famous literary novels such as Jane Eyre and The Great Gatsby, Prattshowed instead that “literary and natural narratives are formally and functionally alike.”26 For22Schiffrin, Approaches to Discourse, 32.See Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Film and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1978); Gerald Prince, A Grammar of Stories (The Hague: Moutin, 1973);and Vladimir Propp, TheMorphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).24Monika Fludernik, Towards a Natural Narratology (London: Routledge, 2009), 40.25Ibid.26See Mary Pratt, Toward A Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977), 66.238

example, just as speakers announce or preface their stories in some way and assume their‘speaking position,’ titles of literary works “invite people to commit themselves to the audiencerole” and essentially serve as the novels’ preface or abstract.27Such similarities, greatlysignificant to the study of narrative, are not surprising for Pratt since “both are attempts to renderexperience.”28The field of narrative analysis moved beyond the analysis of written texts and folktales.Its main source of linguistic data became oral or spoken narratives told in a variety of ‘natural’settings. Labov, amongst the pioneers of narrative analysis, with his model of narrative analysisthat developed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s introduced the systematic study of oralnarratives. He showed that this form of talk is in fact coherent, well structured, and full ofsignificance. Since this study, the past four decades of narrative analysis has been dedicated toapproaching and analyzing spoken narratives from a variety of perspectives, all of which trace itsbeginnings to Labov’s initial model. The definition for the term “narrative,” within the field ofnarrative analysis remains a basic issue.29 That the term “narrative” is ubiquitous and is used inmany disciplines with various meanings also poses further challenges. However, a prototypicalnarrative, interchangeable with the term ‘story,’ is most often understood in discourse analysisand in many other disciplines as characterized by chronology. A story or narrative is thereforeusually seen as a recounting of a past event.30 Labov’s definition of narrative is a “recapitulation27Ibid., 60.Ibid., 51.29Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.30Deborah Tannen, Conversational Strategies: Analyzing Talk Among Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2005), 123.289

of past experience”.31 Yet, there are other definitions of narrative that deviate from thistraditional characterization. Some scholars have foregrounded the element of conflict or“trouble” as defining a narrative.32 There is also a pragmatic way to conceive of narrative.Bruner describes narrative as an “all purpose vehicle.” He writes that “ it not only shapes ourways of communicating with each other and our ways of experiencing the world, but it also givesform to what we imagine, to our sense of what is possible. With its aid, we pole vault beyond thepresently expectable. And of course it shapes our conceptions of the past.”33 That narratives canafford such powers to humans has also shaped how scholars define narratives. Many scholars putforth narrative as epistemology. Under this approach, narratives are seen as an “antidote torationality and the quantitative measures prevalent in the social sciences,” and essentially apowerful tool for the construction of knowledge.34To understand the place of narrative in social life, and the breadth of narrative, I turn toOchs’s depiction of a world without narrative:35Imagine a world without narrative. Going through life not telling others what happened to you or someoneelse, and not recounting what you read in a book or saw in a film. Not being able to hear or see or readdramas crafted by others. No access to conversations, printed texts, pictures, or films that are about eventsframed as actual or fictional. Imagine not even composing interior narratives, to and for yourself. No. Sucha universe is unimaginable, for it would mean a world without history, myths or drama; and lives withoutreminiscence, revelations and interpretive revision.Ochs emphasizes the universality of narrative and its variety of genres. Narrative can either beunderstood in a limited way to mean a story or, in a broad sense, to include genres of literature,31William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania, 1972), 359.32See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).33Jerome Bruner, “Narrative, Culture, and Mind,” in Telling Stories: Language Narrative and Social Life, ed.Deborah Schiffrin, Anna De Fina, and Anastasia Nylund (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press), 45.34De Fina and Georgakopoulou, Analyzing Narrative, 17 19.35Elinor Ochs, “Narrative,” in Discourse as Structure and Process, ed. Teun A. Van Dijk (London: SagePublications, 1997), 185.10

reports, sports, news broadcasts, plans, and agendas.36 At the most basic level, narratives are adiscourse practice found in everyday ‘real’ talk or conversations. They can exist separately orappear embedded in other discursive practices such as arguments and prayers.37 Theseconversational narratives, referred to as everyday or ‘natural’ narratives, are themselves equallydiverse. Fludernik touches on the variety of spoken narrative forms:38On the one hand, oral storytelling comes in a great variety of forms and shapes from spontaneous narrationof personal experiences (natural narrative proper) to the telling of jokes and anecdotes, the retelling of otherpeople's experience (narrative of vicarious experience), bare reports and summaries of events, the telling'of imaginary scenarios, all the way to the longer and culturally institutionalized forms which eventuallydeveloped into the epic and the folk tale.A question that drives narrative analysis is why people tell narratives. Are narratives justabout relating experiences? The first step in broaching this question is to understand thatnarratives do not appear out of a vacuum. De Fina writes that “narratives are seen as bothproduced and received from specific social and historical loci, and are therefore studied more asprocesses that emerge under certain socio historical conditions than as finished products.”39 Assuch storytelling is a social practice shaped by and shaping multiple social contexts.40 Inexamining the interplay of these social and historical variables and the production of narrative,narrative analysts draw attention to the narrators’ multiple motivations. Reasons for tellingstories include the desire to teach and to learn, to transcend the “here and now,” sharing emotionsand attitudes, informing, arguing, entertaining, “unburdening” and positioning.41 De Fina and36Ibid., 189.Ibid., 187 188. See also De Fina and Georgakopoulou, Analyzing Narrative, 97 107. Here the authors look at hownarratives are used as argumentative devices.38Monika Fludernik, Towards a Natural Narratology (London: Routledge, 2009), 10.39Anna De Fina, “Crossing Borders: Time, space, and disorientation in narrative,” Narrative Inquiry 13:2 (2003),368.40See introduction to De Fina and Georgakopoulou, Analyzing Narrative, 1.41See Deborah Schiffrin, Anna De Fina, and Anastasia Nylund, eds., Telling Stories: Language, Narrative andSocial Life (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010), 1 6, and3711

Georgakopoulou also add that for individuals as well as groups “narrative tellings may serve asoccasions for the exercise of power and domination and for the perpetuation or creation of socialinequalities.”42 One of the most widely argued reasons for which people tell stories is selfpresentation, or self image: people mainly tell narratives to construct or to preserve certainimages of themselves. Thus, narratives and identities are tightly connected. Even reputations ofpeople and places are created with narrative.43 This is will be further elaborated on in Chapter 2in my review of post Labovian scholarship.A major point of consideration in my analysis will be the question of self presentation.Treating God as the Speaker, I draw parallels to what other speakers generally do with spokennarratives and argue that one way to understand God’s narratives is to also see them as adiscourse strategy in which God is creating, developing and sustaining His superior identity. Assuch they can be considered as God’s own ‘personal’ narratives that He is recounting for certainreasons. In each of the forthcoming chapters, I examine how God constructs and maintains His‘Self image’ through the use of narrative. I specifically show that the narratives of Sūrat al Kahfbecome a discursive practice through which God constructs an image based on three key divineattributes: God as al walī ‘ The Protector,’ al qādir ‘The Omnipotent,’ and khayr un thawāb anwa khayr un ‘uqb an ‘Best giver of reward and punishment.’ These attributes pervade thenarratives in various manifestations across each structural element, which inevitably dominatethe recounted past events.Tabea Becker and Uta M. Quasthof, eds., Narrative Interaction: Studies in Narrativity (Philadelphia: JohnBenjamins Publishing Company, 2005), 1.42De Fina and Georgakopoulou, Analyzing Narrative, 125.43See Gabriella Modan and Amy Shuman, “Narratives of Reputation: Layerings of Social and Spatial Identities,” inSchiffrin, De Fina, and Nyulund, eds., Telling Stories, 83 94.12

A pervasive yet subtle way by which God sustains His superior “Self image” is in usingconstructed dialogue in the narratives. Constructed dialogue is the reproduction of voices in theQur’ān, such as statements or dialogue of past prophets, angels, and even animals. In my study,following discourse ana

Chapter 1: Introduction to the Qur'ān and Narrative Analysis I. Introduction In the conclusion of Discovering the Qur'an, Neil Robinson states that "As a literary text, the Qur'an is at first reading extremely bewildering. It seems to defy analysis."1 The Qur'ān defies literary analysis because it is not a literary text.