Conceptual and discursive hybridization in the Western-Islamic Academic genre of finance. A case study on ‘Riba’

Abstract

The present study starts from the observation that there are Islamic concepts of Finance, such as ‘Riba’ which is to be explored here, that are totally inaccessible to Western students of Finance. Furthermore, they are also unavailable to them. Yet, in a globalized world, such concepts need to be understood, so as to make them accessible and then acceptable. Thus it is necessary to hybridize them with parallel Western concepts. The study, which is part of a wider research-in-progress, introduces a cognitive-functional approach (Halliday 1985) to the analysis of three selected mini-corpora of academic texts on Finance in English, respectively identified as ‘Corpus A’, ‘Corpus B’ and ‘Corpus C’. ‘Corpus A’ is made up of texts from original Islamic sources in their official translation into English. Texts from Corpus A represent the Islamic Finance perspective as reflected in both their specialized conceptualisation and their culture-based textualisation, as they are marked by the influence of the religious culture of Islam upon economic transactions. ‘Corpus B’, instead, is made up of texts from a Western/US perspective reflected in (a) the specialized concepts and (b) the Western ‘standards of textuality’ (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981) that characterise them. Finally, ‘Corpus C’ is made up of Islamic texts that are here defined as ‘hybrid Islamic-Western texts’, representing an emerging academic genre that displays specific features in terms of both novel semantic and textual structures. Analysis of this Corpus C is aimed to highlight the varying degree(s) of discourse hybridization, this implying, as it will be shown in the ‘analysis’ section, a focus on acceptable concepts and textual structures for the prospective Western readers of the texts.