A Textual Analysis of Islamic texts within the Orientalist discourse: focusing on Henry Corbin’s works

The main purpose of this paper is to study the rhetorical structure of the Islamic texts, concentrating on Henry Corbin’s works mainly “Inside Iranian Islam“ book series. Henry Corbin was a famous French “Orientalist“, “philosopher“, “Iranologist“, “theologian” and a professor of Islamic Studies. The term rhetoric simply means: “How to say what we want to say“. The way of the organization of saying in discourse follows some patterns. The main goal would be exploration of the organizational patterns of Islamic texts and highlighting the linguistic indices by which we arrive at these patterns. There is an assumption that the organizational patterns of texts differ considerably between specialist areas of use. The rhetorical structure of Islamic texts are supposed to be different from economic texts, for example. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is a way to describe relations that hold between different parts of texts. It offers an explanation of the coherence of texts. Rhetorical Structure Theory can be considered as the way has been used in this study for the analysis of discourse organization of chosen Islamic texts.

Keywords:

textual analysis , Islamic Texts , Henry Corbin , rhetorical analysis , discourse