Legitimizing Violence in Religious Propagation?: Linguistic Metaphors as Stance Acts in Boko Haram Pre-Violence Sermons

Abstract

Much linguistic effort has been made to analyze Boko Haram’s (BH) threat texts or newspaper reports on its activities using various discourse analytical and pragmatic tools. However, the group’s early preaching, which offers a deeper understanding of its mission and ideology, has hardly ever received attention, much less how the group conceptualizes violence through religious propagation. This article investigates how linguistic metaphors are conceptually deployed in BH’s early sermons to mark the group’s stance on using violence in religious propagation. The corpus comprises five full-length sermons delivered in Hausa/Arabic by earlier BH leaders (Muhammad Yusuf and Abubakar Shekau) between 2008 and 2011 before the group went into violent confrontations. The sermons were recorded, translated to English for uniformity, coded in line numbers, and subjected to content analysis drawing insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Stance Triangle. The study reveals that the BH group employs several conceptual mapping strategies that project three stance acts, namely, assigning value to the group’s positions on the use of violence in religious propagation, drawing their target audience into similar positions, and invoking ethno-religious rewards/reasons for such positions. The results suggest that the use of certain metaphors could potentially impact society in various ways.