Dress code

Another element I examine in televangelists' performance is the use o f dress code. According to Van Leeuwen (2005: 58-61), dress code has an important social meaning. Adopting an anthropological view, Van Leeuwen (ibid.) compared the social meanings o f dress codes in some religious communities in the United States to some o f the contemporary meanings o f dress code in Western societies. Whereas in the Mennonite community in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, young girls have more freedom than married women in choosing what to wear, in contemporary Western consumer culture, dress codes “are certain accessories that signify change” in which “aspects o f identity” signified by clothes are not related to constructs such as gender and age but seem to be rather related to “personality traits” such as “adventurous” and “calm” (ibid. p.62). For example, the following advertisement is taken from the website o f New Look, a fashion store popular among youth, in which the t-shirt is commodified as being most suitable to those who love adventure.

White L ove A dventure T-Shirt Now £ 3 .0 0 W a s £ £ S S

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ROLLOVER TO ZOOM Q FULL SIZE + - M odel Is 5'S‘ '1 7 Ec t a n d w e a rs UK 10.EU W U S 6

Figure 5.4. Love Adventure T-shirt on New Look

5.2.6. G estures

Another element I examine is the use o f gestures. Krauss, Chen and Gottesman (2000) provide a categorization o f gesture types. M otor gestures are “simple repetitive rhythmic movements that bear no obvious relation to the semantic content o f the accompanying speech” (ibid.) and tend to accompany speech prosody. Symbolic gestures have conventionalized meanings; examples o f symbolic gestures would be holding finger to lips indicating “be quiet” . In addition, deictic gestures “consist o f indicative or pointing movements, typically formed with the index finger extended and the remaining fingers closed” . The meaning o f a deictic gesture is to indicate the things pointed to (ibid. 263). As for metaphorical gestures, they are visual representation o f abstract ideas and

categories, e.g. displaying an empty palm hand may indicate "presenting a problem".

As I will illustrate in the following chapter, the use o f gestures is a salient element in televangelists' performance. For example, both Hamza Yusuf and Yusuf Estes make use o f the index finger to give emphasis to their claims and adopt the footing o f authority. The following image for example is a Print Screen shot from a YouTube video in which Yusuf Estes converts a young man to Islam. Estes explains -to him- what Islam means; the use o f the index finger together with the clutching o f his right hand serve to position him as a figure of authority, which acts as an “anchorage” to the banner that reads “ Sheikh Yusuf Estes”, presenting Estes as a revered preacher .

5.2.7. Frames

Following Goffman (1974: 10), I define frame as “principles o f organization which govern events and our subjective involvement with them ” . According to Riberio and Hoyle (2009), many contextualization cues can indicate change in frame, for example, choice o f topic, voice quality and postural shifts. In Chapter 6, I examine an excerpt for Yusuf Estes in which he converts a young man to Islam. The use o f frame serves to give a dramatic effect to Estes' performance (see 6.1.4. Estes, the proselytizer). To illustrate, in the YouTube video I will examine in Chapter 6 in which Estes proselytizes a young man, two frames occur in the video: 1) Estes stands at a podium talking to a young man (among the audience) explaining Islam to him and 2) Estes walking down the stage towards the young man, hugging him as he utters his belief in Islam. The contextualization cues that signal the transition between frames include Estes' movement towards the audience accompanied by the use o f music indicating the shift to new action.

5.3. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have started by situating this study in the discipline o f Critical Discourse Studies, pointing out that the study employs a synergy o f the DHA and the theory o f Visual Grammar. The first section o f the chapter elaborated on the genre o f religious preaching and televangelism. First, I have noted differences between the admonition genre which focuses on death and the Day o f Judgment and televangelists' sermons that are relevant to the everyday life o f Muslims. Second, the sermons o f the three televangelists appear to be aimed at

the acoustic performance (e.g. weeping). This indicates the hybridity and complexity o f televangelists' sermons which have become a multi-modal field. Moreover, the fact that the three televangelists have online visibility has implications for the development o f the study as I draw on various data to investigate how the three televangelists construct their identities, including YouTube sermons, posts published in their online spaces and YouTube comments.

In the second section o f this chapter, I discussed the relevance o f the DHA to televangelists' sermons as it allows for the deconstruction o f the layers o f context surrounding televangelists' sermons, including verbal language and performance-related elements such as dress code and staging. Using DHA as an analytical framework also allows for the deconstruction o f other discursive (and rhetorical) strategies such as the construction o f in-groups and out-groups, the discourse topics and the fields o f action each televangelist creates and televangelists' use o f religious and historical references, among other aspects. Related to the above is that the DHA has particularly addressed the discursive construction o f collective identities, hence its relevance to the topic o f the study. Following on from this explanation, I have elaborated on the main analytical categories I employ in analyzing televangelists' sermons and their performance. In the following chapter, I move on to investigate the first research question o f the study: How do the three televangelists self-represent their identities?

Chapter 6

Televangelists' self-representation strategies: Constructing multiple identities

One question I explore in the study is how the three televangelists self­ represent their identities. However, I cannot examine the above question without contextualizing it in the complexity o f televangelists' sermons being a hybrid genre that embeds many discourses, genres and sub-genres. As a discourse genre, televangelists' sermons are a highly interdiscursive fabric in which televangelists in many ways invoke discourse topics on religion, society and politics (see Chapter 8).

To illustrate the above, whereas politics is an anchor point for sermons by Hamza Yusuf, society or rather the criticism o f M uslim societies is a main topic in Baba Ali's YouTube video-blogs. In addition, while personal narratives are featured in the performances o f the three televangelists, it is heavily drawn upon by Yusuf Estes; for instance, in his sermon "Why the West needs Islam”, Estes narrates stories about his childhood, employing discourse topics on racism in the 1940s to the 1960s in the United States, which serves his discursive strategy o f the positive representation o f US (Muslims) and the negative representation o f Them (Americans) (see Chapter 8). In the same vein, the three televangelists draw- in varied ways- on entertainment-related features such as dramatization, music and sound effects.

If we use a metaphor here, a cooking one, we can compare televangelists' use o f modes and genres to baking ingredients; the same ingredients (discursive and multi-modal) are drawn upon by the three televangelists; however, their performance and identities are different because they make use o f different clusters o f discourses and sub-genres that create for each televangelist a distinct representation.

To illustrate the above, the discourse topics Hamza Yusuf addresses contributes to his presentation as an intellectual, taking the latter to mean “a person o f recognized intellectual attainments who speaks out in the public arena, generally in ways that call established society or dominant ideologies to account in the name o f principle or on behalf o f the oppressed” (Hewitt, 2003:145). One topic he invokes, for instance, is the unity o f Abrahamic faith (e.g. The Unity Talk, Washington, September 201151); he mentions that the word "merciful" (Rahman in Arabic) is related to the Hebrew word "Rakhm". In the same sermon, he argues that "Jews and the Muslims have a shared destiny as a people" and that "when the Jews were threatened by extinction in Andalusia, it was the Moroccans and Ottomans that said "come, come to us and the Jews in M orocco to this day, acknowledge that". Thus, he seeks to assert the unity o f Muslims and Jews and to defy anti-semitic rhetoric by some Muslims (see KhosraviNik, 2010 on the anti- semitic rhetoric o f Ahmadinejad). On another occasion, Yusuf argues that Holocaust denial undermines Islam and that "in acknowledging the pain o f

others... we achieve fully our humanity"52. By positioning Muslims and Jews in the same community o f fate, Yusuf is taking a normative position o f rejecting anti- M uslim discourses and, equally important, anti-semitic ones (e.g. see Reisigl and Wodak, 2001; KhosraviNik, 2010).

M oving on to Baba Ali's performance, unlike Hamza Yusuf, he makes more use o f entertainment features and in part represents him self as an entrepreneur. His recent YouTube video-blogs start with a song that advertises a dating website he created “H alf our Deen” ; it draws its name from a religious saying "marriage is h alf our faith, deen". In a similar way to Estes and Yusuf, Ali invokes many discourses; for example, religious advice and social counseling/criticism. While in one video-blog, he warns against arrogance ("Arrogant People", broadcast January 200753), in another video blog, he offers a comedic sketch o f idiosyncrasies he sees during Friday praying. In a boring sermon, one character falls asleep, another circulates photos, and a third reads the newspaper (“Funny Things You See During Jummah, broadcast June 200654).

Whereas Yusuf Estes and Hamza Yusuf construct their authorities, inter alia, as preachers, Baba Ali frequently repeats "I am just an ordinary brother reminding people and reminding m yself', enacting his “ordinariness” and claiming a different type o f authority (see below). However, while being a different profile from

52 Link to the article: https://vvww.voutube.com/waich7v-LTW7P7-7N RE Last accessed 17th May 2015. 53 Link to the video: https://vvvvw.voutube.com/vvatch7v9fka3Lu prO Last accessed 17th May 2015. 54 Link to the video: