Nelson Mandela has been hailed as one of the most influential leaders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is not surprising that he is highly respected in many Arab countries, many of which have witnessed some degree of instability and political turmoil. His death in 2013 attracted attention across Arabic media. Al Jazeera, Al Arabia, Sky news, BBC Arabic, CNN Arabic as well as local TV channels in Arab countries devoted considerable coverage to narrating his legacy and broadcasting his funeral. In a similar vein, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter mourned Mandela's passing, commemorating him and his legacy for weeks after his death. He is still remembered years after his departure. Biographies and other books about Mandela have been translated into Arabic; some have multiple translations. UNESCO translated several of Mandela's important speeches into Arabic as a part of a widely circulated project named “A Book in a Newspaper.” These translations were published in almost all Arab countries (Mohammed and Banda, 2016).

When the Arab Spring began in 2011, political figures like Javari and Gandhi inspired Arabs to mobilize in the Freedom Squares of their countries and as protests gained momentum, their names echoed in the chants of activists. The status of these figures nevertheless pales in comparison to Mandela. Arab protesters in their activism often referred to a letter they claim was written by him at the height of the Arab spring in 2011. It is a message of advice and wisdom; calling for tolerance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Hence, while Arab protesters raised pictures of Javari, Gandhi, and other leaders during the Arab Spring, Mandela's image was visible in many Freedom Squares, and his words to the Arab masses circulated widely across social media and in Arab press.

The news of Mandela's death was woefully received by politicians and common people across the Arab world. Interviews with politicians in official media and on social networks demonstrate the level of respect for Mandela, his struggle, and personal history. BBC Arabic, for example, devoted its well-known programme nuqṫat ḍau to documenting the reaction of Arab people to Mandela's death. People from various Arab countries such as Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq as well as Arabs living in countries like Sweden and the UK responded to the central question of the programme; “What does Mandela mean to you?” This programme and other similar ones aired by Arabic media channels were mainly devoted to the death of Nelson Mandela. However, they also intended to document the attitudes of Arabs toward Mandela, including their reaction to his death. Participants also took the opportunity to express their opinions about various issues in the Middle East. In other words, the focus shifts from commemorating the legacy of Mandela to expressing intrinsic and extrinsic topoi, including conversations about identity, ideologies, and the representation of the Self and the Other. This may have been because Mandela's death came at a time when several Arab countries were experiencing leadership crises and consequent uprisings, with some experiencing harrowing and terrifying civil wars, extremism, violence, and terrorism. Speeches of mobilization in the name of religion, partisanship, and revolution plunged the Arab world into despair, frustration, crisis, and disintegration. Amidst the crises of leadership, Mandela's extraordinary legacy commitment to ending apartheid and bringing peace and reconciliation to South Africa inspired Arabs who were struggling for nations free of injustice, corruption, violence, and discrimination. The death of Mandela has fueled debate in Arab media and lead to a greater diversity of topoi which are often not directly related to his death or even his legacy. It is not an exaggeration to suppose that the death of Mandela received more attention from Arab media than his release from prison in 1990 or his being elected president in 1994. Although Mandela's background, struggle, release from prison, and presidency have always been topics of interests in Arabic media, the discourse on Mandela was typically confined to certain politicians who aligned with the ideology of the channels, and who were carefully chosen by them.

The corpus used in this study does not only represent these views from mainstream media, but also the views of active content creators on digital media platforms. The diverse nature of the corpus can be attributed to the fact that it represents the perspectives of people with a variety of religious and political beliefs, education levels, gender identities, ethnic origins, and geographical backgrounds. Religious and secular, moderate and radical, African-Arabs and Asian-Arabs, men and women, academics and laypeople, all have an equal opportunity to commemorate the death of Mandela, and are likely to be represented somewhere in a corpus. Rapid advances in social media technology have enabled previously inactive mass media consumers to create their own content about Mandela and his legacy. This has led to greater diversity in intrinsic and extrinsic topoi that transcend those introduced by politicians hosted by Arab mainstream media.

The present study is a political discourse analysis of an Arabic corpus comprised of media coverage about the death of Nelson Mandela. It sets out to explore how Arabs reacted to his death by evaluating the language they used to express their attitudes and the topoi and ideologies they explicitly or implicitly embraced. Hence, this study addresses the following questions:

Many theories of critical discourse analysis (CDA) have been used in the analysis of political discourse. This section deals with three of these approaches, namely Norman Fairclough's “discourse as a social practice” (Fairclough, 2001), Teun van Dijk's “social cognition approach” (Van Dijk, 2001), and Theo van Leeuwen's “social actor network” (Van Leeuwen, 2008).

Fairclough's “discourse as a social practice” (Fairclough, 2001) has been used to analyze the political discourse on Islamic Khilafah during the rise of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014 (Hidayatullah, 2017). The ideological representation of the concept in two well-known Arab media channels, namely Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya was investigated. The approach was also employed in the analysis of the image of Arab immigrants in American and British media, as well as the image of Arabs in American press (Shousha, 2010; Hattab and Fakhir, 2020). In addition, Al Jazeera debates on the Yemeni uprising of 2011 (Al Kharusi, 2017) and articles posted on their English website to mark the third anniversary of the uprising in 2000 of Palestinians against Israeli authorities, known as the al-Aqsa Intifada (Wenden, 2005) were also analyzed using Fairclough's approach. The approach was also employed to explore the identity of Arab women in three Arab newspapers, namely, Midan Al Jazeera, Al-Ittihad, and Mawdoo3 which discussed problems in the social lives of Arab women (Hamid et al., 2021).

Van Dijk's “social cognition approach” found its way into several studies on Arab political issues. It has been used to investigate the ideologization of Arab media discourse with specific reference to the construction of the Gulf crisis in the headlines of Al Arabiya English and Al Jazeera English (Kharbach, 2020). The approach was also used to investigate how politicians participating in the May 2017 Arab-Islamic-American Summit in Riyadh presented themselves and others, and the techniques they employed to send ideological messages to their opponents and allies (Youssef and Albarakati, 2019). This approach was also used to unravel identity reproduction in the national anthems of some Arab countries (Arab Yousofabady, 2019) and to investigate the conceptualization of the term “extremism” and its Arabic equivalent taṭaruf on Twitter (Hamdi, 2022).

Another key framework of CDA is Van Leeuwen's “social actor network” (Van Leeuwen, 2008). This approach has been employed to investigate the representation of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in American newspapers such as the (New York Times) (Abdulkareem and Qassim, 2017) as well as in the analysis of the representation of Iran in the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (Ghasemi Asl and Niazi, 2020). This newspaper was deliberately chosen because it is associated with Saudi Arabia, where media discourse is often diametrically opposed to other Arab worldviews. This highlights the numerous ways in which ideology is used in the press.

Topoi in political discourse have been investigated in many studies. Topoi used in describing others, such as migrants, were analyzed by J. E. Richardson, who listed topics including humanitarianism, justice, responsibility, finances, reality, numbers, law and rights, history, culture, and abuse, among others (Richardson, 2004, p. 4). Krzyzanowski (2009, p. 103) identified national vs. European topoi in two corpora. Common topoi in national corpus include uniqueness, history, East and West, past and future, modernization, the EU as a national necessity, the EU as a national test, and etcetera. The European corpus, on the other hand, included topoi such as diversity in Europe, European history and heritage, European values, European unity, Europe of various speeds, European and national identity, Europe as a future orientation, modernization, joining the EU at any cost, and preferential treatment. Similarly, the Arabic slogans of the Arab Spring included topoi related to political humor and satire, political evaluation, political threats, Arab nationalism, resentment of current policies, accountability, and standards of living (Al-Sowaidi et al., 2017, p. 627–629). Frequent topoi mentioned by Iranian Presidents Hassan Rouhani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly were also investigated in a recent study of two speeches (Alemi et al., 2018). According to the researchers Rouhani follows a moderate political ideology, while Ahmadinejad, is more conservative. Among the topoi found in the speech of the former are world fears of war, militarism, violence, globalization of western values, political superiority, and Iranian elections. Topoi such as egoism, distrust, dictatorship, periods of slavery, crusade wars, and the occupation of Palestine dominate the speech of the latter (Alemi et al., 2018, p. 7–8).

This study draws on critical discourse analysis (CDA) to unravel the underlying political ideologies of participants in a spoken corpus associated with Mandela's death. For the purpose of this study, Wodak's discourse-historical approach (DHA) (Wodak, 2001) is used to examine the manipulative nature of political discourse as well as the identity reflected in the corpus under investigation. At the time this study was conducted, there were no known studies that employed this approach in the analysis of Arabic political discourse. However, it has been widely used independently and eclectically in CDA (Johnson et al., 2010; Momani et al., 2010; Buckingham, 2013). The fact remains that political discourses are laden with certain ideologies, concerns, and representations. In other words, each political discourse has its own unique features, or “content-related argument schemes,” which “can be carried out against the background of the list of topoi though incomplete and not always disjunctive” (Wodak, 2001, p. 74). This study mainly focuses on the topoi of Mandela's death as viewed by Arab politicians. Further analysis of linguistic features such as rhetorical topoi, transitivity, and appraisal, is beyond the scope of this study.

As mentioned earlier, this study is a political discourse analysis of a spoken corpus. It draws mainly on the discourse-historical approach (DHA) (Wodak et al., 1990; Wodak, 1994, 2001). What makes the DHA of CDA relevant to this study is that it not only deals with the linguistic aspects of a text/discourse, but it attempts a multifaceted social critique aimed at integrating “a large quantity of available knowledge about the historical sources, the background of the social and political fields in which discourse is embedded, and the context where analyzed discourses take place” (Wodak, 2001, p. 65). The context of discourse in this approach is examined through an analysis of the linguistic context or co-text; the intertextual and interdiscursive relationship between utterances, texts, genres and discourses; the extralinguistic variables and institutional frames of a specific “context of situation” and the broader socio-political and historical context (Wodak, 2001, p. 67).

DHA is mainly concerned with critiques including (Wodak, 2001, p. 65): (1) Text or discourse immanent critique, which aims to discover internal or discourse related structures; (2) socio-diagnostic critique, which attempts to reveal the persuasive or potentially manipulative nature of certain discursive practices; and (3) prognostic critique, main goal of which is to contribute to the improvement of communication. This study aligns with Wodak's view (Wodak, 2001) that it is not a goal of CDA to determine accuracy. Instead, researchers should continuously evaluate each stage of the research process and justify their choices. A CDA approach may also explain why some interpretations of discursive occurrences appear to be more valid than others. Hence, the notion of triangulation is one of the methodological techniques that can be adopted by critical discourse analysts to minimize bias. Ultimately, DHA is more flexible as it allows the use of multi-methodical approaches which can incorporate various empirical data and background information.

A concept within DHA that is relevant to the present analysis is that of topos (plural: topoi). Introduced by Aristotle and used by later rhetorical theoreticians including Cicero, the concept was used in classical argumentation theories (Žagar, 2010). Through topoi, speakers clarify their positions on a variety of concerns. For instance, politicians can illustrate and describe the types of relations they hope to establish with international powers and agencies (Alemi et al., 2018, p. 6). For Wodak, topoi or loci are the premises, either explicit or implicit, of argument. Topoi are connected through “the content- related warrants or conclusion rules which connect the argument or arguments with the conclusion, the claim” (Wodak, 2001, p. 74). Wodak used the term topoi in a narrow and adapted sense and for triangulation purposes. In line with this usage, a critical discourse analyst needs to employ argumentation theory or, more specifically, the theory of topoi with a view to realizing the principle of triangulation. Topoi can be intrinsic (i.e., part of the discourse) or extrinsic aspects that arise during an argument. Several topoi are likely to be evoked by certain lexicons or lexical groups (Bruxelles et al., 1995). Intrinsic topoi can therefore pave the way to more extrinsic ones that were not planned as part of a discourse, as shown in Figure 1.

Topoi can be dynamic, and might be incorporated in a speech or a text through “a single word or a group of lexical phrases with several other topoi which together form a topical field” (Alemi et al., 2018, p. 4). In line with this view, and the method of triangulation recommended by Wodak, it can be argued that the use of corpora tools can assist in encapsulating various topoi in a political speech more efficiently than a manual analysis and codification would, especially when unpacking and processing a bulk of data, as is the case in this study.

This is a corpus-based study of a selection of Arabic TV programmes broadcasted after the announcement of Mandela's death in 2013. The corpus in this study includes 6,636 words, and was checked against the video and audio versions of the speeches to determine whether they were exact transcriptions. For the transcription of data, a multimedia annotation tool called EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (ELAN) was used. This is a tier-based tool for multimodal data in which annotations can be created in multiple layers, or tiers and thus is beneficial to both qualitative and quantitative multimodal research. The annotation can be a word, a sentence, a translation, a note, or a comment. The transcription for this study was created using ELAN and aligned to the time in the videos and audios, as shown in Figure 2.

After completion of the transcription in ELAN, the output was processed using a cloud-based corpus tool known as Sketch Engine. This tool can provide a list of useful computational linguistic methods that help locate topoi deployed in a corpus. Collocations, wordlists, concordances, and N-grams are some of these methods. Figure 3 is a snapshot of the wordlist from the corpus used in this study.

Although a wordlist can provide an idea of the topoi in a corpus, it may be more useful to use an N-grams tool to determine not only the most frequently occurring words, but also the most frequently used expressions, as shown in Figure 4.

The corpus also locates key words and expressions in context through the concordance tool, which gives a precise understanding of the co-text, as well as the context of a word or expression. Hence, keywords, N-grams, and concordances can be used to extract intrinsic topoi employed in the corpus under investigation. A concordance, for instance, can provide key words in context (KWIC) allowing researchers to locate certain lexicons in different contexts of a speech, or a text, and thereby provides a more comprehensive picture of the progression of discussion. This can help to identify and extract extrinsic topoi that may have been implicitly argued by the speaker(s).

Based on the various corpora analysis tools, the most frequent topoi related to Mandela's death that appear in the corpus are: leadership qualities of Mandela, leadership crisis in the Middle East, the Palestinian cause, the Arab Spring, Mandela's imprisonment, Mandela's death, Mandela's symbolism, racism, and tolerance, among others. These topoi are all intrinsic since all of them are associated with certain lexicons, as shown in the concordances and graphs below.

The purpose of this study was to analyze a spoken Arabic corpus about the death of Nelson Mandela through an investigation of the topoi employed by politicians from various countries in the Middle East to discover how they identified themselves in relation to others. The results of the study showed that the corpus abounds in topoi that are not directly related to Mandela or his death, but to heated political issues in the Arab world. Many politicians have shifted their focus away from the main topic, which was the death of Mandela, to conflicts and political plights in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine. The politicians used the programmes where they appeared as platforms to express their feelings, and to compare Mandela with Arab leaders. As noted, the discussion often digressed to the deployment and projection of the ideologies of participants and their respective countries. In many cases, these ideologies transcend national boundaries and are representative of Arab nationalism and identity in general. Frequent topoi in the corpus include leadership qualities of Mandela, leadership crises in the Arab world, imprisonment of Mandela, Arab Spring, reality, number, Mandela's legacy, tolerance, and reconciliation. The manipulation of discourse is also noticeable in various positions throughout the corpus. Although the corpus in general includes mention of Mandela qualities, some aspects of toxicity are also apparent.

The novelty of this study is in its methodology and approach to the analysis of political communication. At the time this study was recorded, it was the first that investigated the topoi of Mandela's death in Arab media and perhaps globally using such an approach; there are no known studies that employ a discourse historical approach (DHA) in the analysis of Arabic political discourse. Another aspect of novelty is that the analysis of topoi in this study is based on ample data that represent mainstream media as well as alternative digital media. Moreover, the analysis of political discourse would be incomplete should a researcher fail to pay attention to the linguistic features of the text. The corpus-based research methodology adopted in this study provides a list of useful computational linguistic methods that may help in understanding the discourse more objectively and in locating the diversified ideologies and identities involved in the corpus. Collocations, wordlists, concordances, and N-grams have been employed to unpack the political discourse about Mandela's death.

Despite these aspects of novelty, the study has some limitations. The study mainly focused on the topoi deployed in a spoken Arabic corpus. More studies are needed to investigate the topoi in other journalistic and literary contexts. Social media and websites abound with many elegies, articles, posts, and blogs about the legacy of Mandela. Further studies could deal with analysis of linguistic features such as transitivity, appraisals, and modality in discourse related to Mandela's death. More studies could also deal with rhetorical devices used by Mandela and the topoi deployed in his speeches.

Historical discourse analysis in general and the investigation of topoi in particular are promising CDA methods for analyzing political discourse. Topoi often differ from one political context to another, and may give clear glimpses of the ideologies of participants as well as the manipulative strategies employed by them to create an impact on their audience. DHA can be used as a framework of CDA analysis to investigate political discourse in the Middle East and beyond. Owing to its diversity, the Arab world is confronted with a plethora of sociopolitical and religious issues. Examples of these issues include political homogeneity, identity struggle, xenophobia, racism, refugees struggle and rights, extremism and terrorism, anti-Islamic discourse and islamophobia, religious violence and minority rights, to mention just a few. Although sociopolitical issues, political engagement, and religious issues (among others) pertaining to the Arab world are very widely studied across the humanities, the use of contemporary theories of critical discourse analysis in these studies has not been given adequate attention.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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