‘But I did not do anything!’ – analysing the YouTube videos of the American Muslim televangelist Baba Ali: delineating the complexity of a novel genre

ABSTRACT

Televangelism or preaching religion via TV and YouTube represents an interesting media phenomenon in which religious messages are presented in an entertaining manner. Despite the novelty of televangelism and its popularity, little attention has been paid to the investigation of the features of this genre, which could allow insights into the nature of this phenomenon and the reasons behind its popularity. In this study, I focus on the case study of the American Muslim televangelist Baba Ali who gained popularity through a series of videos on YouTube. With insights from the Discourse Historical Approach and the Framework of Visual Grammar, I analyse four key aspects of Ali’s videos i.e. religious invocation, video-edition and self-representation, use of humour and interactivity. I demonstrate that Ali’s videos represent a novel genre that embeds features of the sermon, video-blogs and YouTube culture. Furthermore, I show that Baba Ali represents a new type of a religious figure whose authority appears to emanate from his ordinariness as he presents himself as one of his audience; and from his playfulness. Thus, I elaborate on contemporary Muslim televangelism and extend the application of Critical Discourse Studies to religious discourse, a domain little examined from a critical perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Televangelism
• YouTube
• religious discourse
• Islam/Muslims in the West
• the Discourse Historical Approach
• multi-modal analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments as well as the editor of Critical Discourse Studies Dr John Richardson for his guidance. I am also grateful for my PhD supervisors, Emerita Distinguished Professor Ruth Wodak and Dr Shuruq Naguib at Lancaster University, for their feedback on an earlier draft of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Shaimaa El Naggar gained her PhD in Linguistics from Lancaster University in 2016 in which she explored the discursive construction of Muslim identities in the YouTube sermons of three popular Muslim televangelists in the West. Her thesis explored the interdisciplinary domains of new media and religion. Shaimaa’s research interests include sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Studies, digital media communication and cultural studies. At Lancaster University, she convened the research group Language, Ideology and Power together with Emerita Distinguished Professor Ruth Wodak. She facilitated seminar sessions and lectures on discourse analysis and sociolinguistics at Lancaster University, Birmingham University and Fayoum University (Egypt). E-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1 The link to Baba Ali’s YouTube channel ‘umma films’: https://www.youtube.com/user/ummahfilms.

2 The link to ‘Muslim while flying’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nolNcJ1G7w&t = 12s and the link to ‘randomly checked at the airport’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = C6VAxucmNeI&t = 70s.

3 For example, an evidence of the transnational popularity of Baba Ali is that his videos are subtitled and translated into many languages, including Dutch, French, Indonesian and Russian, as can be seen in this link: https://www.youtube.com/user/ufsubtitles/videos.

4 The link to ‘distractions during salat’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = MTwh6p1kyRQ.

5 An example can be the sermon of the famous Egyptian preacher Mohamed Hassan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Mzf-knehRfs in which he prays for the audience to be the companions of the Prophet in the afterlife (2:00–2:25).

6 The link to ‘arrogant people’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 9fka3Lu_pr0&index = 3&list = PL0102E2656D1D4C93.

7 In this context, topoi refer to content-related argumentation that ‘justify the transition from the argument to the conclusion, the claim’ (Wodak, 2001, p. 74). To demonstrate, the topos of culture used in discriminatory discourse on migrants is based on the condition that ‘because the culture of a specific people is as it is, specific problems arise in specific situations’ (Wodak, 2001, p. 76).

8 The link to ‘Hurray for Baba Ali’: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list = PLBDFA3531B9B89EEB.