Rethinking Classical Arabic Rhetoric for Contemporary Nigerian Public Discourse: A Theoretical and Applied Study

Classical Arabic rhetoric as codified in the balagha tradition offers a sophisticated and theoretically rich framework for the analysis and production of persuasive discourse that has been almost entirely disconnected from the analysis of contemporary Nigerian public communication, despite Arabic rhetoric's continued influence on Islamic public discourse in northern Nigeria and its potential contributions to the broader study of rhetoric in multilingual African contexts. This study undertakes a comprehensive theoretical rearticulation of Classical Arabic rhetorical principles for application to contemporary Nigerian public discourse, drawing on the full balagha tradition alongside Western rhetoric theory, African orality studies, and contemporary discourse analysis to produce an original Afro-Islamic Rhetoric Framework. The theoretical framework development is grounded in extensive textual analysis of Classical Arabic rhetorical sources and contemporary Nigerian Arabic public discourse, including political speeches, civic addresses, religious public communications, and media commentaries, collected from Kano, Lagos, Abuja, and Sokoto between 2020 and 2024. A corpus of 180 public discourse texts is analysed using the Afro-Islamic Rhetoric Framework, demonstrating its descriptive and interpretive utility. The framework is further validated through facilitated rhetoric workshops with 30 Arabic studies academics and public communication professionals who assess its applicability to their own discursive contexts. Keywords: Classical Arabic rhetoric, balagha, contemporary Nigerian discourse, Afro-Islamic framework, rhetorical theory.