A Stylistic Study of persuasion in Imam Hasan's selected speeches

Abstract

"The Lord of Heaven's youth is Imam Hasan. By acting against Mu'awiyah, Imam Hasan created the best impression of political acumen and a deft understanding of jihad (Holy War). The revolutionary leader who gave all to end tyranny and corruption for the benefit of social justice. Imam Hasan's goal was to strengthen the ties of amity, unite the populace, and mobilize them to oppose the party headed by Mu'awiyah and a few opportunists. His purposefulness carried a great deal of academic values and moral standards that demonstrated the moral and edifying elements of his message. Imam Hasan was a sharp thinker with a solid background in politics and logic.
In light of this, the current paper makes an effort to analyze Imam Hasan's speeches in order to identify the techniques he uses to support his imamate attributes and to discuss the realization of identity and background through language use, which is primarily based on Norman Fairclough's assumptions.
Consequently, this study hypothesizes that (1) the effect of the Glorious Qur'an is dominated in the speeches of Imam Hasan , (2) Both of Imam Hassan speech and that of Prophet Mohammed () share a structural resemblance . To attain the aim of this study and assess its hypotheses, some speeches of the Imam are chosen randomly to be analyzed by utilizing Fairclough's(2001) framework. The main concern of the study is to find out the content of the Imam speech as well as how it was carried out. More specifically, research questions included: (1) how does Imam Hasan convince his audience to believe in his ideas and solutions?(2) how does intertextuality (quotations from other sources) strengthen the speech of the Imam?, (3) does the magic of figurative language come to help Imam Hasan achieving his goals? , (4) what are the referents of loaded pronouns (we, I, me) in the speech?, (5) does the function of metaphor facilitate the understanding of one entity in terms of another? Among other things, the study reveals the following: (1) Imam Hasan quoted passages from the Qur'an, and speech of Prophet Mohammed ,in the right places; (2)most interestingly, Imam Hasan strategically used pronouns like "I" and "we" in order to let the concept of “Imamate” govern the flow of his whole speech. The findings of the analysis verify the above hypotheses.