On the Arab History of Discourse Analysis and the Decentering of Western Epistemic Hegemony

Is Discourse Analysis a Western discovery or invention, such that we must remain indebted to the West every time we engage in dialogue or reflect upon language?

In 1952, the American linguist Zellig Harris published his study Discourse Analysis, widely regarded as a foundational moment in the modern history of the term. But is this a sufficient ground for claiming that Discourse Analysis is a gift bestowed upon the world by the West?

Discourse analysis is not a Western invention, at least not in terms of its actual practice and historical development. We must therefore begin by acknowledging that the history of knowledge does not commence at the moment Western academia recognizes and names a particular field. Knowledge practices have their own social histories, and the history of a term is neither the history of its practice nor necessarily that of its underlying concept. Centuries before Harris, Arab and Muslim thinkers were already examining language as a system through which meaning and the world itself are produced; language as an act conditioned by context, positionality, power, and interpretation; and the relationships between speech, truth, belief, and the manifest and latent dimensions of meaning. Much of this intellectual engagement developed within what came to be known as علم الكلام (Islamic theology). Far from being an excessive preoccupation with linguistic beauty/aesthetics (as it is framed in the famous song العربي أصلي by Egyptian singer ويجزWigz), it constituted an epistemic practice at the intersection of philosophy, logic, jurisprudence الفقه , and politics.

Beginning in the second Islamic century, the Muʿtazilites developed an intellectual inquiry into the relationships between language, reason, truth, and the sacred, as well as the conditions under which an utterance acquires the force of an argument and the relationship between the apparent and underlying dimensions of phenomena. Some Muʿtazilite thinkers, particularly within the tradition associated with Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī (d. 321 AH/933 CE), developed an understanding of the relationship between words and meanings as grounded in convention and social agreement, rather than in a necessary, natural, transcendent, and immutable bond. This understanding was further elaborated by al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 415 AH/1025 CE) in his discussions of the origins of language.

ʿIlm al-kalām علم الكلام was not discourse analysis in its contemporary disciplinary sense. Nevertheless, it constituted a systematic practice of examining utterances, their underlying assumptions, and the modes of reasoning through which they acquire legitimacy and exercise influence within society and among speakers. It is important not to reduce it to an Arab origin of discourse analysis. Our concern here is not with tracing the genealogy of a term, but with historicizing a practice. More precisely, it represents one of several intellectual traditions that render untenable the Western claim to a monopoly over the history of thinking about language and meaning and from within.

In the third Islamic century, al-Jāḥiẓ الجاحظ (d. 255 AH/868–869 CE), in al-Bayān wa-l-Tabyīn البيان والتبيين (Eloquence and Exposition), developed a conception of bayān that extended beyond verbal expression to encompass the means of signification and the conditions of intelligibility and communication. An utterance, in this understanding, cannot be separated from its addressee, its context, or its means of expression. Later, Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī أبو هلال العسكري (d. c. 395 AH/1005 CE), in al-Ṣināʿatayn الصناعتين (The Two Arts), examined the construction of discourse and the techniques of influence and persuasion. With ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī عبد القاهر الجرجاني(d. c. 471 AH/1078 CE), the study of meaning production acquired exceptional theoretical depth. Meaning was no longer understood as an independent property of individual words, but as an effect of the relationships established among words within a particular syntactic arrangement. In Dalāʾil al-Iʿjāz دلائل الإعجاز(Proofs of Inimitability), his theory of naẓm النظم (linguistic arrangement) makes it possible to understand meaning as relationally constituted rather than as the sum of isolated lexical units, an insight that intersects with certain concerns of modern linguistics.

We can argue that these traditions of linguistic and discursive analysis were never socially neutral or detached from relations of power and their political economy of meanings. They were bound up with questions of who possessed the authority to interpret, who determined the acceptability of meaning, how legal judgments were derived, and through what forms of authority a particular reading of a text became a binding norm for individuals and society. This opens the possibility of approaching the Arab linguistic tradition as an intellectual history in its own right: a history of struggles over meaning and the legitimacy of interpretation.

Where, then, does the problem lie? In the history of the term, or in the history of the practice?

The problem lies not merely in the erasure or neglect of this history, but in the epistemic order that makes its recognition conditional upon comparison with, or subordination to, Foucault, Saussure, or Fairclough. When Foucault is presented as a producer of theory, while al-Jurjānī is invoked as a figure from the intellectual heritage whose significance lies in having anticipated certain Western ideas, we reproduce precisely the epistemic centrality we claim to dismantle. Theory remains Western, while the non-Western thinker must establish their intellectual legitimacy through resemblance to it. Epistemic liberation cannot be achieved simply by adding Arab names to a bibliography dominated by Western references. It requires interrogating the historical and institutional conditions that determine what is recognized as theory and what is relegated to the category of heritage, perpetually seeking recognition and legitimacy.

This asymmetry has been historically produced and reorganized through modern colonialism's control over educational institutions, epistemic structures, archives, languages, and systems of classification. More importantly, colonialism elevated Methodology above Understanding itself, producing the colonized as an object of white Western knowledge, supposedly incapable of understanding themselves without its conceptual and methodological intervention.

Does this mean that Western knowledge should be rejected in its entirety because of its entanglements with whiteness and colonialism?

Certainly not! Rather, it means rejecting the assumption that such knowledge is innocent of the material and political conditions of its production. It means refusing the notion that methods developed within Western epistemological traditions are necessarily neutral, or that they can be separated from the ways in which they order and constitute the world. The presumed universality of Western white knowledge is treated as though it were a natural fact requiring neither historical interrogation nor critical scrutiny. Indeed, Western knowledge is so often taken for granted as the starting point of all intellectual practice that this assumption permeates even our most casual discussions and our collective consciousness.

Just as we must distinguish between the term and the practice, we must distinguish between critiquing Western epistemic centrism and rejecting Western knowledge altogether. The task is neither to replace one epistemic center with another nor to claim that the Arab intellectual tradition was free from relations of power, hierarchy, exclusion, or moments of intellectual regression. The sciences of kalām, rhetoric, and jurisprudence themselves emerged through sectarian struggles, political and social institutions, state structures, and networks of contractual and institutional relations. Certain strands of these traditions also participated in legitimizing systems of rule and domination. Returning to them, therefore, cannot be an act of reverence. It must constitute a double movement of critique: dismantling Western knowledge's claim to universality and its presumed possession of the keys to knowledge, while simultaneously interrogating the relations of power through which non-Western forms of knowledge were produced.

Such critical consciousness cannot be separated from a critique of modernity, its epistemic centers, and its historical and structural foundations, organized around three interrelated forces: colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. The monopoly over the production of theory—most often written in English, as though the language itself certifies its centrality, secures its untranslatability, and guarantees a particular social position and over the distribution of academic recognition does not operate independently of a global political economy of knowledge. This economy is structured through universities, publishing houses, research institutions, databases, translation and editorial policies, and funding mechanisms. It also sustains an international division of intellectual labor in which the center produces concepts while the peripheries are expected to adopt and identify with them, confined to the status of empirical testing grounds. Those positioned at the periphery are rarely expected, or institutionally encouraged, to interrogate the historical formation of the terms they employ or the epistemic biases embedded within them before adopting them as their own.

What is at stake here, then, is neither simply who coined a term nor who first practiced (the) concept. The issue extends into our lived positionalities and everyday conditions of existence, into the very ways we think about and through knowledge. To claim that discourse analysis is a methodological instrument graciously bestowed upon us by white Western academia, enabling us, the colonized, to dismantle the structures of domination imposed upon us—and that no such practice existed in our intellectual histories before the English term was formally established is to sever colonized peoples from their own histories of struggle in the very name of contemporary liberation. Such a position is untenable, both in its consequences and in its underlying conception of knowledge. It recalls the formulation attributed to the Moroccan anticolonial freedom fighter Abdelkebir Khatibi عبد الكبير الخطيبي: "Defeat always comes from within."

Building an anticolonial and anticapitalist epistemic practice therefore demands more than correcting the history of discourse analysis. It requires transforming our relationship to theory itself: refusing to treat Western knowledge as an indispensable condition for understanding the world, and refusing to reduce the experiences of colonized peoples to empirical cases through which theories formulated elsewhere are applied and validated. Such theories are often borrowed by Indigenous and colonized intellectuals - including figures such as Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said - to interpret their own realities, as though those realities had not already generated forms of counter-knowledge through longstanding struggles against such domination and hegemony. As though the colonized had been waiting for someone, elsewhere in the world, to coin an English term before they could begin to understand the conditions of their own existence.