Islam de Belgique, islam moderne ou islam des origines ?

Abstract

This article studies a large corpus of newspaper articles about Islam in Belgium. The analysis focuses on repeated segments, i.e., collocations that appear regularly throughout the corpus. Among all the repeated segments identified we isolated those that contain the word Islam, namely 27 definite or indefinite nominal expressions (Islam in Belgium, modern Islam). We will first observe the nature of these phrases (their syntactic structure and semantic content which enable them to behave as more or less fixed expressions) and, in a second step, their discursive meaning and referential properties through the study of co-occurrences. These repeated segments uncover a social endeavour to define Islam on the basis of competing representations which vary according to the place this religion is meant to have in Belgian and European societies.