Democracy in Contemporary Egyptian Political Discourse (review)

This work is the sixth volume of a series that investigates political, social, and cultural processes from a discourse analysis perspective through the employment of linguistic tools. Dunne discusses some Arabic function words, pronouns and the definite article, in analyzing discourses to explicate the implicit by ‘employing a social/ethnographic level that explores the interactional context that produced the discourse’ (4). Specifically, D is interested in ‘how and why the issue of democracy is discussed in Egypt’ (1) and in proposing ‘a new reading of Arabic political discourse’ (3). Her data are based on excerpts of two speeches by Egyptian President Mubarak, a written petition from four opposition party leaders (referred to as the ‘September Petition’), and two articles each by two journalists (referred to as ‘intellectuals’). These last two are a man and a woman from opposite ends of the political and ideological spectrum, an Islamist and a secularist, respectively (86). All speeches and newspaper articles were produced between June and December 1999.

The book, based on D’s Georgetown University doctoral dissertation, consists of six chapters. Ch. 1 (1–12) introduces the context of the study, the ethnographic data, and methodological approaches and research strategies. Ch. 2 (13–42) is a discussion of theorists on political discourse in general, and scholars of Arabic political discourse in particular. In addition, this chapter presents linguistic tools such as deixis, interdiscursivity, and frames that were employed in the linguistic analysis. Ch. 3 (43–72) situates the discourse historically and demographically and provides social contexts for the data under discussion. Ch. 4 (73–94) examines the formation of ‘identity’ in President Mubarak’s speeches and the two journalists’ writings, all of which were published in the semi-official Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram, except for one piece published in al-Shaab newspaper. Ch. 5 (95–126) examines power-relation strategies in the texts through the linguistic devices of deixis, frames, and interdiscursivity. Ch. 6 (127–32) presents the overall findings of the research and offers advice on how to apply the methodology used in the study of political discourse.

D mentions her unpublished research on discourse construction of identity in policy speeches by a US cabinet member (9–10). It would have been useful to have cited this work in the bibliography, or at least to have a summary of it for comparative purposes. One can argue that limiting the corpus to the few selected oral and written texts may have biased D’s analysis. Enlarging the data by including other viewpoints from different time periods would have enriched the study and provided a more comprehensive picture of the ongoing and heated discussions about democracy in Egypt.

Some inconsistencies appear in the production of this work: the use of italics in the names of journals, newspapers, and books was not strictly adhered to (5, 6, 9, 31, 133, 134). Transcription of Arabic for the same referent (55; 56, Table 3) and also for the name of the same individual (159, 161) assumed different forms. The use of upper case for names of newspapers, journals, and books was not adhered to uniformly (69, 70). Further, there were typos in the Arabic texts (148, 151, 157). Perhaps because President Mubarak, in the delivery of his speeches, veered from the scripted texts, the recorded segments of texts that D analyzed diverged in some words from the texts in the appendices (76, excerpt 65 (full Arabic text on p. 158); 151, excerpt 17 (157); 150, item 6 (157)).