Critical Discourse Analysis of Arabic-Language Nigerian Islamic Newspapers: Gender Representations in Al-Mizan and Al-Bushra

Arabic-language newspapers published in Nigeria occupy a distinctive discursive space in which Islamic norms, Nigerian sociocultural realities, and journalistic conventions intersect to produce particular representations of social groups, including representations of gender that warrant critical examination. This study applies Critical Discourse Analysis to the representation of gender in two Nigerian Arabic-language newspapers, Al-Mizan and Al-Bushra, investigating how women and men are linguistically constructed and positioned in news reporting, opinion columns, and social commentary over a two-year period. Using a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis methodology, the research compiles a 150,000-word corpus from both publications spanning January 2022 to December 2023, employing tools of lexical analysis, transitivity analysis, and nominalisations to identify systematic gender representational patterns. Corpus linguistic methods including keyword analysis and collocational profiling are combined with close reading of strategically selected texts. The study finds that women are significantly less frequently mentioned than men across both publications and are predominantly constructed in relational and domestic roles even in news contexts, while men are represented in agentic, authoritative, and public capacities. The critical framing of these patterns is situated within the broader context of Arabic Islamic press discourse and the gender politics of northern Nigerian public life. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Arabic newspapers, gender representation, Nigerian media, discourse analysis.