Participation Type

Paper

About the Presenter

Cipto WardoyoFollow

Presentation #1 Title

Delivering Advice through Stories in the ISO (Islamic Sermons Online) Corpus

Presentation #1 Abstract

Delivering advice through stories in the ISO (Islamic sermons online) corpus

Preachers and sermons play a prominent role in advice discourse, explaining what is morally good or evil from God’s perspective. Although advice is intended to point out what is best for the listeners (Searle 1975); it can also be seen as a ‘face-threatening act’ in that it can be interpreted as limiting the freedom of those receiving it (Brown & Levinson 1987; Morrow 2006). One way of making advice less direct is to couch it in a story. A story can serve as a piece of moral advice (Bamberg 1997). A form of teaching that uses an illustrative story to get across a moral point has been used by the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Indeed using stories to convey religious messages was the characteristic form of Jesus’ teaching (Rule, 2017). In Islam, the Qur’an uses a number of terms to refer to stories, such as naba, hadith and qasas. A large part of the Qur'an contains stories about the characters in the Old and New Testaments (Tottoli, 2002: 3). The Qur'an does not provide detailed stories and it focuses on the didactic lessons from those stories (Fatoohi 2006: 2). Telling stories as a means of advice-giving differ from more straightforward instructional genres such as commandments, rules and procedures (Rule, 2017: 2). The idea of employing ‘didactic’ stories is that people can learn from the positive characters or negative characters (Snodgrass 2008: 41). Stories used in this way may be followed by more direct advice which interprets their moral messages or preachers may leave the interpretation of the story to the audience.

At-A-Glance Bios- Presenter #1

A PhD student at Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Coventry University, The United Kingdom

A lecturer at Faculty of Adab and Humanities, UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung, Indonesia

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Delivering Advice through Stories in the ISO (Islamic Sermons Online) Corpus

Delivering advice through stories in the ISO (Islamic sermons online) corpus

Preachers and sermons play a prominent role in advice discourse, explaining what is morally good or evil from God’s perspective. Although advice is intended to point out what is best for the listeners (Searle 1975); it can also be seen as a ‘face-threatening act’ in that it can be interpreted as limiting the freedom of those receiving it (Brown & Levinson 1987; Morrow 2006). One way of making advice less direct is to couch it in a story. A story can serve as a piece of moral advice (Bamberg 1997). A form of teaching that uses an illustrative story to get across a moral point has been used by the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Indeed using stories to convey religious messages was the characteristic form of Jesus’ teaching (Rule, 2017). In Islam, the Qur’an uses a number of terms to refer to stories, such as naba, hadith and qasas. A large part of the Qur'an contains stories about the characters in the Old and New Testaments (Tottoli, 2002: 3). The Qur'an does not provide detailed stories and it focuses on the didactic lessons from those stories (Fatoohi 2006: 2). Telling stories as a means of advice-giving differ from more straightforward instructional genres such as commandments, rules and procedures (Rule, 2017: 2). The idea of employing ‘didactic’ stories is that people can learn from the positive characters or negative characters (Snodgrass 2008: 41). Stories used in this way may be followed by more direct advice which interprets their moral messages or preachers may leave the interpretation of the story to the audience.