A Pragma-Semantic Study of Injustice in the Portrayal of Al-Sayyidah Fatimah Al-Zahraa in Islamic Narrations

Islamic narrations constitute a significant linguistic domain in which historical events are represented, evaluated, and interpreted. The representation of injustice concerning Al-Sayyidah Fatimah Al-Zahraa in these Islamic narrations is not merely historical; it is also constructed through inferential and evaluative resources. Although previous studies have examined this concept from historical, theological, and limited linguistic perspectives, a combined pragma-semantic investigation of this concept remains underexplored. Therefore, this study aims to identify the pragma-semantic construction of injustice in the portrayal of Al-Sayyidah Fatimah in Islamic narrations. It also seeks to identify the similarities and differences between the selected narrations from two groups of Islamic schools. To achieve these objectives, certain research questions are developed. This study adopts a qualitative approach by employing an eclectic model, consisting of Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) and Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) to analyse 12 selected narrations. The study focuses on three major events in the life of Al-Sayyidah Fatimah: the inheritance of Fadak, the attack on the house, and Al-Sayyidah Fatimah’s grievance. The findings demonstrate that the selected Islamic narrations employ different pragmatic and semantic aspects in constructing the representation of injustice associated with Al-Sayyidah Fatimah. Whereas the narrations of the second group foreground injustice concerning Al-Sayyidah Fatimah through explicit evaluative language, dialogic expansion, and stronger contextual support, the first group’s narrations tend to reconstruct or redirect these representations through comparative evaluation, dialogic contraction, implicature, and contextual inference. The significance of the study lies in providing a pragma-semantic account of how injustice is constructed in religious discourse through the interaction of inferential and evaluative meaning. This study contributes to linguistic and Islamic studies by demonstrating how language contributes to meaning construction in religious discourse.