The Pragmatics and Ideology of Hausa Islamic Discourse: A Multi-Genre Analysis Across Northern Nigeria

Islamic discourse in Hausa encompasses a diverse range of spoken and written genres including Friday sermons, Quranic commentary, religious debate, devotional poetry, and Islamic radio programming, each with distinctive pragmatic conventions and ideological positionings. This doctoral study develops an original analytical framework for Hausa Islamic discourse, integrating pragmatic theory, ideological discourse analysis, and Islamic text theory to provide a comprehensive multi-genre account of how Islamic meaning is constructed, contested, and communicated in Hausa across northern Nigeria. The research employs a five-year multi-site multi-genre discourse study, building a corpus of over 500,000 words of Hausa Islamic discourse from seven genres collected across six northern Nigerian states spanning all three northern geopolitical zones. Data collection involves recording of live sermon and teaching events, collection of published Islamic Hausa texts, and recordings of Islamic radio programming. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis is combined with close ethnographic analysis of selected discourse events and interviews with 50 Islamic scholars and preachers on their communicative orientations. The study addresses critical gaps in the existing literature, which has addressed Hausa Islamic discourse only in isolated genre studies, by providing the first systematic comparative multi-genre analysis. Original theoretical contributions include a Hausa Islamic Discourse Typology articulating the genre-specific pragmatic norms, ideological orientations, and authority construction strategies of each studied genre. The research also develops an account of how globalised Salafi Islamic discourse interacts with local Hausa Sufi and traditional scholarly discourse conventions. Keywords: Hausa Islamic discourse, Pragmatics, Ideology, Multi-genre analysis, Northern Nigeria.