Religious Affiliations and Masculine Power in Jordanian Wedding Invitation Genre

A RT I C L E 691
Religious affiliations and masculine

power in Jordanian wedding invitation
genre
Discourse & Society
Copyright © 2006
SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi)
http://das.sagepub.com
Vol 17(6): 691–714
MOHAMMED NAHAR AL-ALI 10.1177/
0957926506068428
J O R DA N U N I V E R S I T Y O F S C I E N C E & TECHNOLOGY
A B S T R A C T . The
present study examines through a genre and critical
discourse analysis a total of 200 Arabic written wedding invitations in terms
of their component patterns, and the role played by the broader socio-cultural
norms and values in shaping this genre. It draws on two analytic frameworks
from discourse: genre analysis, and critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA has
exposed at least two interrelated aspects of culture – religion and masculine
authority – that have a fundamental effect on the organizational details of this
communicative event, and a detailed genre analysis has identified eight generic
components that are ritually drawn upon in the process of wedding invitation
production. CDA results have shown how religious affiliation and masculine
kinship authority not only construct and shape text component selection but
also color the lexical choices and naming practices. I hope that the results of
this study will be of help in further understanding the socio-cultural aspects
that constrain the communicative behavior of the target language speakers,
and in providing cross-cultural contrast in intercultural communication.
KEY WORDS: critical discourse analysis, genre analysis, socio-cultural factors,

wedding invitation
1. Introduction
Invitation, irrespective of form, is a commemorative social action having the
function of informing and requesting the presence or participation of a person(s)
kindly and courteously to some place, gathering, entertainment, etc., or to do
something. Invitations in general occur in written or spoken forms. Printed forms
of invitation, in particular, share certain generic features that set them apart
from other text types. They are instances of a traditional text type, in which
socio-cultural conventions play a major role. Having the function of informing
potential recipients about something, they belong to a group of texts Miller
(1984) calls ‘homely discourses’, which include ceremony announcement texts
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692 Discourse & Society 17(6)
of everyday life, such as weddings, birth, obituaries and the like. A wedding
invitation is an easily recognizable ‘homely’ genre, a category that is well known
to readers throughout the world. Its content tends to be predicable in terms of the
mention of ‘wedding’, the name of the bride and groom, and the time and the
place of the ceremony; and the phrasal form in which each of these components
appears is also conventionalized (Johns, 1997: 39).
Studies in Arabic on linguistic routines and formulaic patterns of the homely
genres of Arab societies are not numerous. Following from Wolfson’s (1981)
general descriptive analysis of American English oral invitations, Salih (1996)
attempted a sociopragmatic analysis of oral invitation formulae and responses to
show the similarities and dissimilarities between American English (AmE) and
Jordanian Arabic (JA). Salih found that due to religious references in JA, and
certain socio-cultural norms in AmE and JA, inviters might use particular
formulae or linguistic elements in their invitations that do not have any
corresponding equivalents in the other language.
The researcher has used a comparative approach based on exemplary speech
acts in isolation cited from a variety of speech situations and highlighted the
differences between them. This kind of approach can be criticized for its lack of
an analytical framework that focuses on the different types of invitations and it
also lacks the necessary sensitivity to the versatility of genre description, in the
sense that it allows invitations to be viewed as a single genre at a high level of
generalization. In reality, invitations represent a grouping of closely related sub-
genres, such as invitations for feasts, invitations for weddings, invitations for
tribal reconciliation, or for meetings, etc., serving broadly similar communicative
purposes although each has its specific communicative function and is different
from others in a number of aspects, such as context of use, domain, participant
relationships, medium of discourse and other constraints. Each of these vari-
ables affects the sequential organization of each communicative event and the
kind of component moves used to articulate its specific purpose. The alternative
approach is to explore and describe each individual communicative event.
Al-Ali (2005) identified an unusual type of wedding announcement termed
‘martyr’s wedding’. This was recognized as one of two types of death
announcements in Jordanian newspapers: one communicates a normal death
while the other celebrates an unusual death, called ‘martyr’s wedding’. Despite
observed similarities between the two types of ceremonies in terms of the
component moves employed to organize each type, the so called ‘martyr’s
wedding’ embodies indications of motivational, promotional, and persuasive
input to the perceived audience, as well as a feeling of pride and honor on the
part of the announcer. Al-Ali (2005) makes clear that these functions corres-
pond closely to the ideology of the participants and reflect their socio-cultural
norms and conventions.
Except, perhaps, for the unusual type of wedding (i.e. the martyr’s wedding)
identified by Al-Ali, no published studies appear to have focused specifically on
Arabic wedding invitation genre in terms of its sequential component
Al-Ali: Religious affiliations and masculine power 693
organizational patterns, and the impact of the broader social norms and values
on the articulation of these patterns, and the present article represents an
attempt to fill those lacunae. Thus, the following questions provided the basic
framework for the study:
1. What typical discourse generic component patterns can be identified in the
wedding invitation genre?
2. How is the invitation genre text structured? Whose interests are fore-
grounded by this organization and whose interests are not served?
3. Which elements of the socio-cultural context are relevant in the wedding
ceremonies and which elements have more influence and power?
4. How does the concept of power (i.e. domination and authority) technically
work and how is it conveyed in the wedding invitation genre?
This study matters because, as the review of the literature has revealed, there
seems to have been virtually no systematic investigation of the written wedding
invitation genre in Arabic. Therefore, this research is the first of its type to throw
some light on this common widespread socialization process from which one
learns ‘the rules and practices of social groups’ (Worsley, 1970: 153). ‘Learning
foreign languages is learning how to behave linguistically in cultures other than
one’s own’ (Ventola, 1987: 6); thus, this study is deemed necessary for those who
are interested in becoming familiar with and participating in the social life of
members from another culture. Further, such studies would provide interesting
contrasts, necessary for cross-cultural communication. ‘Studies of patterns of
speech behaviour in a variety of languages would provide a solid basis for badly
needed cross linguistic analysis; research which would greatly aid in efforts
toward intercultural communication’ (Wolfson, 1981: 21).
2. The Jordanian wedding ritual pattern

A wedding can be considered as a union between a man and a woman to create
a new family and share their sexual, emotional, and economic lives (Kim, 1980).
As an occasion to announce that the couple is finally ‘tying the knot’ (Johns,
1997), the marriage celebration is the central occasion when couples decide to
formalize the relationship between them in the presence of their families and
friends to make it more definite and project it further into the future rather than
to live only in the present (Blood and Blood, 1978). The written wedding
invitations in Jordan have originated from oral invitations, and only became
widespread during the 1960s, but since then they have established their
presence as an important homely genre.
To gain some understanding of the nature and manifestations of the wedding
invitation genre in Arabic as used and practiced by the Jordanian community, a
discourse analyst needs an understanding of the broader socio-cultural context
related to the social norms and values of the conventionalized occasion studied.
That is because ‘the goals of the participants all have their effects on the form of
texts which are constructed in those situations’ (Kress, 1989: 19). Saville-Troike
(1997: 126) has expressed this view:
In understanding an ethnography of communication in a particular locale, the first
task is to define at least tentatively the speech community to be studied, attempt to
gain some understanding of its social organization and other salient aspects of the
culture, and formulate possible hypotheses concerning the diverse ways the socio-
cultural phenomena might relate to patterns of communication.
In Jordanian society, the influence of religion, kinship, and paternalism on most

aspects of one’s life is obvious. Religion is included in the Jordanian passports and
identification cards and is considered a form of identification. For Jordanians,
one’s own entity and identity is intertwined with his/her religious affiliation.
Unlike most other cultures, embracing a religion (commonly the religion of one’s
ancestors) is an obligation, not a preference. The overwhelming majority of
Jordanians (95%) are Moslems, while the Christians constitute a religious
minority (i.e. 5%). In Jordan, as in most Islamic countries, Islam is designated as
the state religion; thus, its influence covers matters such as death and marriage
(Ata, 1986). That is to say, the marriage practices of the overwhelming majority
of Jordanians are governed by Islamic prescriptions. In this regard, Harries
(1958: 40) points out that ‘Islamic law embraces the whole range of personal
and social life’. Some of the Islamic scholars consider marriage obligatory if one
has enough power (physical and financial) for it, and some others regard
marriage desirable. Narrated Abdullah bin Mas’ud: Allah’s Messenger said to us,
‘O young men, those of you who can support a wife should marry, for it
[marriage] controls the gaze and preserves one from immortality’ (Al-Asqalani,
n.d.: 342). Under Islamic law, a man can marry a woman at will by pronouncing
the formulaic expression ‘I marry you’ in the presence of two witnesses of full
age. The marriage is not valid unless both the bride and the groom have given
free and full consent to the contract of marriage. Although the wedding is
primarily a coupling of individuals, in Jordanian social life it is concluded as a
union between the families of the bride and the groom. Therefore, the actual
marriage arrangements, as is the case in most Arab states, are customarily made
between the two families of the bride and the groom. In the past, neither the Arab
man nor woman could choose their own spouse (Goode, 1970). Although a man
might express his choice, he needed to ask his father to permit him to marry
because the groom’s family always financed the marriage arrangements. Even
these days, there is little change in the search for and choice of a spouse, since the
household goods and ceremonial items and the expenditure for these items are
almost always paid for by the groom’s parents. Even in more complex societies,
the elders ‘hold the power to determine the running of the society’; they play the
major role in rituals to the extent that they ‘decide who marries whom’ (Foley,
1997: 313).
Prior to the wedding ceremony there is the khutbah (engagement), during
which the groom places a wedding ring on his bride’s finger. Unlike the wedding
ceremony, usually for this occasion the immediate family and close friends are
invited to the prospective bride’s house. Sometimes, relatives from the asheerah
(sub-tribe) as well as a large gathering of friends attend the engagement cere-
mony (Harries, 1958). The wedding ceremony, on the other hand, is not likely to
be a simple affair; it is preceded by laborious preparations of the bride, groom and
their families. After a day is chosen by the bride and the groom for the wedding,
the two families of the couple send out written invitation cards to their relatives,
friends, colleagues, and neighbors to notify them of the forthcoming celebration.
In Jordanian society, a wedding celebration is an occasion for communal joy,
which has a rich cultural heritage in this regard. Weddings in Jordan are usually
preceded by one to three evenings of joyful proceedings and dancing as a signal
that the festival has begun. The dance continues till midnight; both men and
women dance separately, though the separation is not complete as they hear
each other’s voices. On the joyful evenings which precede the wedding, grooms
of well-to-do parents bring in singing bands to stimulate the spirits of the guests;
they dance and stamp and clap in semi-circles to the trilling and singing of the
band.
Among the villagers and those who live in town the wedding ceremony is
likely not to be restricted to the wedding celebration. Before the wedding cele-
bration takes place the wedding guests, sometimes more than 1000 altogether,
are often invited to a huge reception, called a ‘wedding feast’. Relatives of the
groom usually slaughter the animals for the feast – goats and sheep – and cook
the rice and meat and serve the wedding meal to the guests. Compared with the
late 1960s and early 1970s, weddings are becoming extremely expensive affairs
so that many grooms and their families cannot actually afford this, and they have
to go into debt to pay for the wedding feast. Thus, more grooms nowadays prefer
to give up these costly feasts altogether due to the recent economic recession in
Jordan. At least half of the couples currently choose the western style of wedding
celebration and the cake-cutting ceremony is imitated in the recently popular
weddings. Observes Goldstein-Gidoni (2001: 33): ‘This kind of West and the
spirit of cosmopolitanism it conveys are also embodied in the overseas weddings
that have recently gained popularity’. On the wedding day there is the
ceremonial participation in the main wedding celebration, which usually takes
place in a public place. The bridal pair goes to a wedding hall where the wedding
guests have gathered to celebrate the occasion. The ceremony usually lasts for
two hours. As soon as they finish the wedding ceremony, the bride and the groom
leave the hall accompanied by a caravan of the invited guests’ cars which
proceed to the groom’s house.
3. Theoretical background
This study draws on two analytical paradigms: genre analysis employed by
Swales (1990) and Foley (1997), and critical discourse analysis (CDA) used by
Fairclough (1995), Van Dijk (1993, 1996) and Wodak (1997). In general,
‘genres’ are ‘highly structured and conventionalized constructs’ that can be

identified on the basis of ‘conventionalized features they continually develop’
(Bhatia, 2004: 23). For Foley (1997), genres are culturally conventionalized
social practices of language production and understanding in the community.
Swales (1990) perceives genre as ‘a class of communicative events, the members
of which share some sets of communicative purposes’ (p. 58). Accordingly, the
fairly specific communicative purpose, which shapes the generic structure of the
discourse, emerges as a result of social interactions and conventions as people
communicate with one another. Genre analysis, as used by Swales (1990) and
Bhatia (1993), refers to a system of analysis that is able to identify the main
communicative purpose of a social activity and to reveal the building component
moves and the patterns of organization of a genre that are used to articulate this
social process. The genre as a whole is made up of a sequence of component
moves, each of which carries out a minor function in the global function of the
genre text (Ventola, 1987). However, these situated sequential components of a
particular genre derive their interpretations, according to Foley’s (1997) view,
from ‘an interpretive set of principles linking historically transmitted schemes for
framing linguistic performances’ (p. 377). That is to say a particular generic text
indexes the current social performances of the participants and the relationship
between them as well as the wider social and cultural issues that give rise to these
practices.
An important thrust in recent years that is relevant to genre analysis is
Critical Discourse Analysis. Several scholars have been closely associated with
CDA, perhaps most notably Fairclough (1985, 1992, 1995), Van Dijk (1983,
1989, 1996, 1998a, 1998b), and Wodak (1989, 1999). CDA, which is a branch
of discourse analysis and has its roots in critical linguistics, goes beyond identi-
fying and describing the component moves that constitute the patterns of a
genre to exposing and deconstructing the social practices, values and beliefs of
the society that shape the arrangement and the selection made in the
construction of a particular genre. For critically minded discourse analysts, it
also explains each of the selections made on the part of the users in the
construction of a particular discourse genre as a socially produced construct. To
Fairclough (1992: 12), discourse is not only perceived as a product or reflection
of social processes but is seen as ‘shaped by relations of power and ideologies’. In
a similar way, Pennycook (1994: 121) attempts to articulate a vision of CDA that
deals with ‘the larger social, cultural, and ideological forces that influence our
lives’. As Pennycook puts it, CDA approaches ‘share a commitment to going
beyond linguistic description to attempt explanation, to show how social
inequalities are reflected and created in language’ (p. 121).
Since CDA is primarily concerned with demonstrating issues of power and
dominance in private and public discourse (Boxer, 2002), and claims to reveal
‘the insinuation of ideology, [and] the imposition of power which other people
fail to recognise’ (Widdowson, 1995: 169), I suggest an extension of the
descriptive scope of genre analysis to include consideration of power and socio-
cultural and ideological influence. In other words, the present research employs
two somewhat overlapping but complementary approaches: genre analysis and
critical discourse analysis. The first approach is utilized to investigate what
component building block moves discourse participants use to construct
wedding invitations as a conventionalized socio-cultural practice. It also
attempts to show how discourse writers use genre as a powerful instrument of
social control (Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1994), ‘and why they write the genre
the way they do’ (Bhatia, 2004: 10). The second approach will focus on the role
of broader social factors such as power and ideology, and social structures that
contribute to the construction and interpretation of this discourse genre (Bhatia
2004: 10). This in turn gives rise to important issues of power and ideological
effects; it can help produce and reproduce unequal power relations between, for
instance, social classes, and women and men that are often unclear to people
through the ways of using language (Wodak, 1997: 173–4). Following Wodak
(1997), who regards the concept of power as ‘a product of and process by which
organization members engaged in organizing activity’ . . . and manifests itself in
hierarchies, in the access to certain discourses and information’ (1997: 174), the
concept of power lends itself very well for our analysis.
As mentioned earlier, the two interacting views of discourse are essentially
complementary to each other. It is possible to use the proposed genre framework,
firstly, by looking deeply into the rhetorical components that are used to
structure this genre and the linguistic and discoursal resources that are used to
realize these components, then working toward socio-cultural context to study
the role relationship between the participants, and the power hierarchy as
interpretation and explanation for textual organization.
4. Data and procedures

As far as data collection is concerned, a total of 200 written wedding invitations
were collected by 45 fourth-year undergraduate Arabic native speakers, as part
of an elective course in discourse analysis. The students were English specialists
taking BA degrees at Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid/Jordan.
To build up a clear picture of the wedding invitations and to ensure that regional
variation was taken into account, I asked the students, who come from different
regions in Jordan, to collect four or five wedding invitations each from within
their own local circle of family and friends. Since written wedding invitations
only became widespread during the 1960s in Jordan, the corpus of data
subjected to analysis has appeared only between the early 1960s and the present
day.
As a Jordanian, the researcher is an active participant in wedding celebra-
tions in the Jordanian community; thus, via observation and participation in
various wedding events, I have been able to observe the weddings carried out by
families, and that has formed a rich background for my understanding of the
people, their life, customs and habits. This in turn gave me, as a researcher, the
information I desired about the effect of socio-cultural rules and norms in the
wedding invitations. When it is a question of understanding the discursive
practices characteristic of culture, we are obliged to seek explanations of their
socio-cultural norms through the eyes of those who know the people thoroughly
or else incorrect judgments and justification will easily occur. By participating in
and observing wedding rituals from the inside at work, ‘the intricacy of all these
many discourses become apparent’ (Wodak, 1997: 175). For Bhatia (2004:
113–14), in order for anyone to claim sufficient experience in genre analysis, one
needs to have some understanding of the context of text-external aspects of the
genre in terms of the broader context in which the genre is to be constructed,
interpreted and practiced in real-life situations.
Following Ventola (1987), Swales (1990) and Bhatia’s (2004) move
structure analysis of texts which is built on the framework that a genre consists
of a sequence of functional component moves articulating its main
communicative purpose, the wedding invitations were analyzed for their
component moves to determine how the inviters accomplished the overall
purpose of their wedding invitations as socio-cultural activities. This involved
scanning the texts to identify text units expressing particular functions.
Following Al-Ali (1999, 2004, 2005), assigning a function to each text unit was
guided by the proposition that each individual unit communicates a particular
rhetorical function which is different from that of the following contiguous text
unit. Each of these text component portions has a particular function in relation
to the overall communicative purpose of the wedding invitation genre (Ventola,
1987). Through recursive passes through the corpus texts, checking all cases, I
developed eight functional categories to include all text units in the corpus. To
validate my analysis of the component moves the inviters used, I asked a second
rater, who worked as a research assistant, to code independently half of the text
corpus (100 wedding invitations). On a check for inter-coder reliability, there was
an 85 percent agreement. The analysis of the wedding invitation corpus revealed
that there were eight component moves by means of which inviters structured
their invitation texts as shown in the following section.
The next two sections present a genre analysis of the corpus at hand in terms
of the surface level generic cognitive features, complemented with a CDA
analysis of implicit socio-cultural norms teasing the ideology in each generic
component of the ritualized wedding invitation. Used together, these two
approaches are capable of yielding a clear description, interpretation and
explanation of discourse.
5. Generic structure of wedding invitations

I analyzed in some detail the wedding invitation corpus not as abstract given
texts, but as contextualized in a socio-cultural situation to illustrate the implicit
wider socio-cultural beliefs (Foley, 1997) underlying the performance of wedding
invitations and the relations between discourse participants. Analysis of
wedding invitations has shown the following eight-move rhetorical structure.

These components do not necessarily occur in the same order in all instances,
and not all of them are obligatory. However, in spite of some variations, the
elements in a typical wedding invitation card appear in the order shown below
(see Appendix).
1. Opening
2. Heading
3. Identifying the inviters
4. Requesting the presence of others
5. Identifying the bride and groom
6. Situating the wedding ceremony
7. Closing
8. Other optional components
5.1 OPENING
This component is usually set apart on its own. It contains either a direct
quotation from the Holy Qur’an (40%) or extracts of Prophet Mohammed’s
invocations to bless the bride and the groom (35%); while 25% of the openings
featured stanzas from Arabic poetry. The Qur’anic quotations include ritualistic
and formulaic verses promoting marriage. Either of the following Qur’anic verses
exemplifies the kind of realization available in the corpus of the ‘wedding
invitations’:
1. wa min ?aayaatihii ?an khalaqa lakum min ?anfusikum ?azwaajan litaskunuu ?ilayhaa
wa-ja’ala baynakum mawaddatan wa-raHmah. ?inn fii thaalika la-?aayaatin liqawmin
yatafakkaruun.
(And among His Signs is this, that he created for you mates from among yourselves,
that ye may dwell in tranquility with them. And he has put love and mercy between
your (hearts): verily in that are signs for those who reflect.)
Surah Al Rum, verse 21
2. wallathiina yaquuluuna rabbanaa hab lanaa min ?azwaajinaa wa thurriyyaatinaa
qurrata ?a’yunin wa-j’alnaa lilmuttaqiina ?imaamaa
(And those who pray ‘Our Lord! Grant unto us wives and offspring who will be the
comfort of our eyes, and give us (the grace) to lead the righteous’.)
Surah Al Furqan, verse 74
The openings of the wedding invitations which were found to be based on

Prophet Mohammed’s sayings were of the form:
?allahuma baarik lahumma wa-baarik ‘alyihimaa wajma’ bainihimaa bi-khayr
(May Allah grant blessings to them and bind them with harmony and goodness.)
This formulaic invocation has its roots in Prophet Mohammed’s sayings which
asked Allah’s blessing, unity, harmony and love for the newly married couple. As
narrated by Abu Huraira, when the Prophet congratulated a man on his
marriage, he would say, ‘Allah bless you, grant you blessing, and prosper your
union’ (Al-Asqalani, n.d.: 343).
A third variety of openings found to be common is in the form of poetry. A
typical poetic form reads like this:
SubHaan man jama’a alquuba bifaDlihi wa-‘alaa riHaabi?ilwardi ‘ammara daarihaa
(Praise be to God whose generosity joined the hearts and Who established homes full
of fondness.)
5.2 HEADING
This move is an optional slot, which often appears in second position. It has a low
frequency of occurrence in the sample (28%). The heading may be mentioned in
the invitation for some special reason, e.g. it enables the invitees to recognize the
particular place of the wedding ceremony whenever there is more than one
wedding taking place in the same building at the same time.
The heading is expressed by a simple noun phrase – ?afraaH (Weddings) –
followed by the groom’s tribe or sub-tribe’s name and that of the bride’s. It is
stressed by being printed in bold as a separate line, and using a different size font,
as illustrated in the following example:
?afraaH ‘asheerat X wa ‘asheerat Y
(Weddings of Tribe X and Tribe Y)
As is shown in the heading above, the wedding is announced as that of ‘Tribe X’

and Tribe Y’ and not as a wedding of ‘person X’ and ‘person Y’. This suggests that
the concept of tribe is inherent in the Jordanian society as, at least on social
occasions; ‘individuals tend to submit to larger kinship groupings, like the tribe’
(Al-Ali, 2005: 21).
5.3 IDENTIFYING THE INVITER

The purpose of this component is to name the inviters. The wedding invitations
are issued in the names of the fathers of the groom and bride or, if either of them
is an orphan, in the name of the grandfather, then the eldest male brother, and
afterwards the uncles. This move identifies a male of the groom’s family and
another from the bride’s (i.e. the ones who request the presence of others). That
is because, according to Prophet Mohammed, ‘There is no marriage without a
guardian’ (Al-Asqalani, n.d.: 347).
It was observed that the name of the groom’s guardian is placed on the right-
hand side before that of the bride’s father or guardian. Because of the right to left
reading orientation in the Arabic language, there is a tendency to start with the
right-hand words of print. Thus, when one is reading the wedding invitation, one
would more likely begin on the right with the name of the groom’s guardian,
which might be more likely to catch the eye. As Arabs love titles, it is usual to see
a plethora of titles before the inviters’ names. Their titles are usually printed in
bold and a large size font. For example, a word signifying the title is used in most
of the instances checked: in 30 percent it is Hajji, in 16 percent Doctor, in 14

percent Sheikh, in 11 percent Teacher, in 7 percent Engineer, in 2 percent
Pharmacist, and in the remaining 20 percent Mr. Through the use of such titles,
which convey information about the status, profession, or the academic degree,
the inviters can exhibit a sense of self-promotion as these titles reflect their social
status. These status entitlements, as pointed out by Foley (1997), ‘are cultural
conventions learned by all adequate actors during socialization and thereby
inculcated in the habitus’ (p. 311).
5.4 REQUESTING THE HONOUR OF PARTICIPANTS

As noted in the data, this element represents the core of the marriage invitation
genre and one of the moves that occurs in all the texts. This enables the inviters,
customarily the parents of the bride and the groom, to request kindly and courte-
ously to others to participate in the marriage celebrations. The bride and groom’s
guardians invite participants either to a public gathering where the celebration
takes place, and/or to a Waliimah (a feast, i.e. for lunch), which is a meal eaten on
the union of husband and wife. According to some scholars, a wedding feast is
obligatory but to many it is Sunna.1 It usually takes place at the groom’s home on
the same day before the wedding celebration takes place. Therefore, this move
potentially comprises two steps. Sometimes, either because of religious belief or
personal preference (as will be further illustrated in the following section), this
move is framed by a step inviting others for a feast (i.e. lunch) on the occasion of
marriage and/or by another requesting their participation in the celebration in a
public gathering. Only 20 percent of wedding invitations included the two steps
whereas over half contained an invitation to a celebration of the wedding, and the
other 25 percent of invitations were for a feast.
All wedding invitations explicitly used verbalized phrasal verb forms
requesting the honor of others’ presence or participation, such as yatasharafan
bida‘watikum liHuDuur (request the honor of your presence), or yatasharafan
bida‘watikum limushaarakatikum (request the honor of your participation).
Typical examples of this move are usually of the form:
1. (the names of the guardians) yatasharafan bida‘watikum liHuDuur Hafl zafaf
....
(X and Y request the honor of your presence to celebrate the wedding
of their . . . .)
2. (the names of the guardians) yatasharafan bida‘watikum limushaarakatihim
?afraaHihim bi-zafaf . . . .
(X and Y request the honor of your participation to celebrate the wedding of
their . . . .)
3. (the names of the guardians) yatasharafan bida‘watikum litanaawili Ta‘aam
?alGaddaa bimunaasabati Hafl zafaf . . . .
(X and Y request the honor of your presence to have lunch on the occasion
of the wedding of their …..)
5.5 IDENTIFYING THE BRIDE AND THE GROOM

In wedding invitations, this move usually mentions the groom and bride’s
names. Placed centrally on a separate line, their names and their titles (if any)
have a larger size font and different typeface. The data revealed that the bride and
groom’s names are preceded with academic and/or professional titles, which
reflect their ranks, positions and academic degrees. It is usual to see titles before
the names of both the bride and the groom, such as ‘Doctor’, ‘Pharmacist’,
‘Lawyer’, ‘Judge’, or ‘Engineer’. Again, it was observed that the groom’s name is
placed on the right-hand side before that of the bride on the same line. A recent
fashion is to have the bride and the groom’s initials embossed inside two hearts
that would appear between the bride and the groom’s names on the same line.
However, unlike the grooms who are always identified by their names and
dignified with titles, the brides’ names are often not mentioned in the invitations.
In wedding announcements, there is minimal reference to the bride’s name.
Instead her name is subtitled by the honorific attribute, kariimatuh (his
honorable) (40%), where the qualifying attribute ‘honorable’ modifies the
deleted proper noun (i.e. bride’s name) and the attached demonstrative reference
pronoun uh (meaning ‘his’) refers to the ‘bride’s guardian’, or by a kinship term,
shaqiiqatuh (his sister) (6%) where the attached pronoun uh refers to the bride’s
eldest brother. That is to say a man is thought to be the guardian of a woman and
remains the instrument of social control after she marries.
5.6 SITUATING THE CEREMONY

This contains explicit information about the time, duration, date, and place of
the wedding celebration to enable friends and well-wishers of the bride and
groom’s families to participate in the occasion. These variants are obligatory in
all wedding invitations; setting the place and date enables many relatives and
friends to attend.
As an important indicator in this component move, the ‘place’ variant refers
either to a public gathering where the wedding celebration takes place and/or to
the residence of the groom’s guardian, which is a regular feature and completely
takes over when the invitation is made to a feast. Often a full address is given with
a town or a village name added and moved to the second position after the ‘time’
variant. The invitations analyzed sometimes included notes indicating that there
were two separate parties taking place, one for males and another for female
members. As men and women are often seated separately, the bride and groom’s
families usually hold a party for women friends and another for men friends.
The ‘time’ variant, duration and date, orients the participants about the day
of the week, and the exact time as well as the duration of the celebration.
Summer and early autumn were the most frequent times for wedding festivals in
the data analyzed. Very seldom did one arrive at a village in Jordan during this
period without hearing sounds of singing and shouts of joy. As to the days of the
week, Friday is often chosen for the celebration of marriages because the men
who work are free and like to participate in the occasion. In wedding invitations,
the day of the week is often accompanied by a further specification, such as
masa?an (evening) or ba‘d Salaat ?aljum?ah (after Friday prayers). About 43
percent of the weddings occurred on Fridays. Although there is a difference of
opinion about the time of wedding feasts, a traditional day to get married,
according to Islamic traditions, is Friday afternoon or evening, as this is primarily
a holiday for Moslems and the day of assembly when they share in common
public worship. The name of the month and the year is added to the day of the
week.
It should be pointed out that 45 percent of the wedding invitations in the
sample featured the occurrence of the formulaic phrase bi-mashii?ati-allah (if God
permits). Considered as a discourse marker (see Schiffrin, 1987), this expression
usually appears in the first position immediately before the date. Farghal (1993:
49) calls it ‘discourse conditional’ (i.e. ‘conditional clauses that are frequently
begged [?] to segments of Arabic discourse in order to mortgage the realization of
the speech act in question, e.g., a promise, to the will of Allah’). According to
Muslim belief, this expression and other similar ones are mentioned ‘when one is
making plans for the future, as Allah is the ultimate agent who can will the
occurrence of future events’ (Farghal, 1995: 255).
An illustrative example of this component is the following:
Wa-thaalika bi-mashii?ati-allah fii tamaam?asaa‘ah?athaaniyah min ba‘di Sallati
?aljum‘ah ?almuwafiq 15/5/ 2003 fii manzil waalid ?al‘ariis fii shaari‘ ?ajaam‘ah
fiimadiinati irbid
This [will take place] if Allah wills at two o’clock after Friday prayers 15/5/2003 at
the residence of the groom’s father, University Street, Irbid City.
5.7 CLOSING
The wedding invitations were rounded off by stock formulaic phrases in which
the inviter either wishes happiness to the invitees, appeals for the invitees’
presence and participation, or calls upon Allah to bless them. The most frequent
favored formulaic instances are:
1. daamat ?al?afraaH Haliifatu diyaarikum ?al‘aamirah
(May your inhabited homes be always full of happiness!)
2. biHuDuurifum tazeedu sa‘aadatunaa wa taktamilu farHatunaa
(Your presence will increase our happiness and complete our joy.)
3. ?al‘aaqibah ‘indakum fii ?almasaraat
(May we visit you in similar subsequent happy occasions.)
4. dumtum mash‘alan lil?afraaH
(May you be always torchbearers of happiness.)
As was noted, these closing phrases can be considered obligatory since they
occurred in one form or another in 95 percent of our sample. Since the type of
formulaic phrases used were very limited in number (i.e. five), this supports
Nwoye’s (1992) view that the use of these closings argues against ‘individual
composition or authorship, and suggests the existence of a standardized format
into which would-be announcers fit the relevant information’ (p. 26).
5.8 OTHER OPTIONAL COMPONENTS

The data showed that almost 55 percent of the invitations in the corpus
concluded with other optional elements containing notices which have to be
observed to ensure a good marriage. These include sub-ritual processes preceding
and following the main wedding ritual, or appeals to the invitees.
To begin with, the wedding cards examined often specify the day and the
place of a sahrah (‘stag party’), which is usually held by the groom for his men
friends to mark his last day of being single, on the evening preceding the wedding
day, as in the following example:
tabd?a ?asshrah masaa ?alkhamiis fii manzil al‘ariis
(The stag party starts on the evening of Thursday at the groom’s house.)
Sometimes, there is also a specification of the time of the ceremonial bringing of

the bride from her father’s house to the groom’s, the tradition being to escort the
bride with a procession of cars to the groom’s house:
?alfaardih ?asaa ‘ah ?alkhaamisah
(The escort of the bride is at five o’clock.)
With regard to the appeals, it appeared that 25 percent of the cards contained
covert or overt appeals to the invitees calling upon them not to bring their
children to the wedding party. Explicit examples are:
?Arajaa ‘adam iSTiHaab ?alaTfaal
(Please do not bring children.)
?idaarat ?aSaalah laa tasmaH bi iSTiHaab ?alaTfaal
(The staff of the wedding hall do not permit accompanying children.)
The following covert expressions are used:

?aHlaam sa‘iidah li?aTfaalikum
(Happy dreams for your children.)
nawman hanii?an li?aTfaalikum
(Pleasant sleeping for your children.)
Jannatu?aTfaal biyuutuhum
(Children’s paradise is their home.)
Some people in the Arab world tend to express their happiness by shooting into
the sky. To avoid this, the inviters often include an appeal to the participants not
to practice this habit, as in the following example:
yumna‘ ?iTlaaq ?al‘iyaarat ?anaariyah

(No shooting.)
Moreover, for religious reasons, 20 percent of the invitations analyzed included

notes indicating that men and women are seated separately, as is shown in the
following examples:
?AlHafl Ghayr mukhtalaT
(The wedding party is not mixed.)
Saalah khaaSah lirijaal wa- Saalah linnissaa
(There is a special hall for men and another for women.)
Having examined the organizational generic structure of Jordanian wedding

invitation cards, I am now in a position to comment on the socio-cultural
conditions and motivations for the organizational characteristics, which give rise
to the type and sequence of the genre components evidenced in my corpus. Part
of the answer lies in the socio-cultural system (Foley, 1997) of the Arab belief
and values, to which I shall now turn, since discourse, as perceived by Fairclough
(1989, 1995), reifies and replicates beliefs and social structure. All in all, a
critical discourse analyst will find a wealth of material in these obligatory and
optional components of the wedding invitation cards. These will be pointed out
and discussed in the following section.
6. Conditions of discourse genre production and interpretations

As noted in the previous section, genre analysis has attempted to identify and
describe the discourse generic component patterns of the wedding invitation
genre as a communicative event in the Jordanian society. CDA, in contrast, not
only mirrors and reflects what goes on in society but it also attempts to interpret
relationships between participants and explain how social power is enacted and
legitimized by a particular dominant entity. As the latter analysis presupposes
insights into more general socio-cultural aspects of dominance, a useful
departure for investigating this section is to consider which elements of the socio-
cultural context are profiled in the wedding ceremonies and which elements have
influence and how the concept of power (i.e. domination and authority)
technically works and is conveyed in the wedding invitation genre. This point is
related to Van Dijk’s (1998a: 6) view that ‘if we want to know what ideologies
actually look like, how they work, and how they are created, changed and
reproduced, we need to look closely at their discursive manifestations’, since what
writers write is in some way influenced by their thinking and their perceptions of
the world. Thus, the written form of the wedding invitation card will reflect the
inviters’ sense of reality and their understanding of the world.
Chief amongst the most influencing conditions in the socio-cultural
institutions, which were found to have an effect on aspects of wedding invitation
Component Moves Wedding Invitation Text

Opening wa min ?aayaatihii ?an khalaqa lakum min ?anfusikum
?azwaajan litaskunuu ?ilayhaa wa-ja’ala baynakum
mawaddatan wa-raHmah. ?inn fii thaalika la-?aayaatin
liqawmin yatafakkaruun.
(And among His Signs is this, that he created for you mates from among
yourselves, that ye may dwell in tranquility with them. And he has put love
and mercy between your (hearts): verily in that are signs for those who reflect.)
(Surah Al Rum, verse 21)
Heading ?afraaH ‘asheerat [Name of groom’s Tribe] wa ‘asheerat [Name of bride’s Tribe]
(Weddings of [Name of groom’s Tribe] and [Name of bride’s Tribe)
Identifying the ?alhaaj [X] wa ‘aqiilatuh wa ?aduktoor [Y] wa‘aqiilatuh

inviters (Hajji [X] & his wife and Doctor [Y] & his wife)
Requesting the yatasharafan bida‘watikum liHuDuur Hafl zafaf …

presence of request the honor of your presence at the wedding ceremony of
others
Identifying the Waladihi ?aduktoor kariimatih

bride and groom (His son Doctor) (His daughter)
(Ali)
Situating the Wa-thaalika bi-mashii?ati-allah fii tamaam ?asaa‘ah ?athaaniyah min

wedding ba‘di Sallati ?aljum‘ah ?almuwafiq 15/5/ 2003 fii manzil waalid ?al‘ariis
ceremony fii shaari‘ ?ajaam‘ah fiimadiinati irbid
This (will take place) if Allah wills at two o’clock after Friday prayers 15/5/
2003 at the residence of the groom’s father, University Street, Irbid City.
Closing daamat ?al?afraaH Haliifatu diyaarikum ?al‘aamirah

(May your inhabited homes be always full of happiness!)
Other optional MulaaHaDah: ?alfaardih ?asaa ‘ah ?alkhaamisah

components (Notice: The escort of the bride is at five o’clock)
nawman hanii?an li?aTfaalikum
(Pleasant sleeping for your children)
F I G U R E 1 . Component move structure analysis of a sample wedding invitation card
cards, were family and religion. A discursive look at the visual organization and
verbal presentation as well as lexical choice practices in the wedding texts
displays many features of the influences and control exercised by Islamic
religious beliefs and Jordanian Arab socio-cultural units, such as kinship, and
family structure. To uncover the influence of discoursal practices as manifested
by paternal power, kinship, and gender discrimination, and reproduced in the
wedding invitation texts, first, we consider carefully the verbal organization of
the following wedding invitation text, including both visual and verbal
presentations, their juxtapositioning, their sequencing, and their layout
vertically (top-down) and horizontally (right-left) (Janks, 1997). Then, we need
to consider the linguistic options and selections to give a fully-fledged
interpretation of the wedding invitation card.
A close look at the wedding text above enables the analyst to recognize that,
besides the other optional components, the text is divided into seven components.
The top component contains verses from the Holy Qur’an dominating all the
following components on the horizontal axis. Each of the second, third, and fifth
components is in turn divided into two with spacing between them on the
vertical axis. The second horizontal component includes the name of the
groom’s tribe on the right side followed by that of the bride’s on the left.2
Immediately following this on the third horizontal axis is the name of the
groom’s father followed by his mother’s name (if mentioned). Below, on the fifth
horizontal axis, is the groom’s name placed on the right side of the vertical
column while the bride’s name (if mentioned) occupies the left side column. The
force of this juxtapositioning and layout directs the reader’s eye to the column of
linguistic text on the right. This pull to the right column of print is due to the fact
that from an Arabic right-left orientation one would be more likely to start
reading with the right-hand column as a habit of Arabic literacy.
The composition of the second, third, and fifth components of the text
together, vertically, has also interesting features on the top-down axis. Each of
these components is divided into two: one on the right and another on the left
with spacing between them. On the top of these two columns, the first opening
component, which contains verses from the Holy Qur’an, dominates. On the first
line on the vertical top-down axis of the right-sided column, the groom’s tribe
name dominates the father’s name on the following line below, which in turn
dominates the groom’s name immediately below, as it occupies a third rank.
Similarly, the left-sided column is occupied by the bride’s tribe name, with her
father’s name on the second line, which in turn dominates the bride’s name
below.
As can be seen, religion occupies the first position in the wedding invitation
followed by the tribal power. Following this is the paternal authority, which in
turn dominates that of the young couples. The patterns of gender and age are
also not distributed equally among the participants (i.e. the fathers, the mothers,
the grooms and the brides). In the texts analyzed, elderly males (fathers or elder
male guardians) espouse a higher form of authority than that of females
(mothers) since males’ names appear before those of females. Similarly, the
groom’s names are placed before the bride’s. At the same time the groom and
bride’s names are placed below their parents’ names. So far, our analysis has
revealed that the structure of the Jordanian family is intertwined in such a way
that the paternal masculine authority and the dependence of the individual on
his/her family operate in such a way that the Jordanian culture could be termed
a ‘kinship culture’.
The religious affiliation, paternal masculine power and gender discrimination
are confirmed not only by the arrangement of the text but also by lexical choices
reflecting beliefs, and naming practices foregrounding masculine authority and
disguising feminism. One may argue that what has given rise to such expressive
ritualistic religious coloring of the wedding invitation is the overwhelming
emphasis on initiating this genre with direct quotations from the Holy Qur’an, or
invocations from Prophet Mohammed’s sayings in the opening move. As can be
concluded from the rendering of the second Qur’anic verse in the opening
component of this genre (Section 5.1), Muslims believe that their wives and
descendents are real sources of comfort and fulfillment of their spiritual
longings. They think that through their wives or through themselves, they may,
by Allah’s grace, be able to move toward truth and righteousness. Likewise, the
first exemplar opening verse in Section 5.1 embodies a belief that man’s loyalty
to the opposite sex is God-given, which in turn results in rest and tranquility
found in the normal marriage of a father and mother dwelling together and
bringing up a family.
The examined data also revealed that religious affiliation is confirmed by the
considerable frequency of lexical choices of religious language, particularly in
situating the wedding ceremony move. For example, the commonly quoted
phrase bi-mashii?ati-allah, meaning ‘by Allah’s Will’, symbolizes Muslims’
attitudes towards their religious beliefs. This formulaic expression is meant to
acknowledge the will of Allah and not to rely upon one’s own resourses so much
as to forget Allah. This phrase comes from what is stated explicitly in the Holy
Qur’an:
(23) Wa laa taquulanna lishay ?in ?innii faa‘ilun thaalika Gaddaa (24)?illaa ?any- yashaa
?allah.
‘And never say of anything, “I shall do such and such thing tomorrow.” Except (with
the saying), “If Allah will!”
(Surha Al-Kahf, v. 23–24)
Similarly, in situating the wedding ceremony component move, the emphasis

placed on social rituals such as that assigned to Waliimah (the wedding feast)
stems from Prophet Mohammed’s saying, who said when addressing ‘Abdur-
Rhman bin ‘Auf: ‘May Allah bless you! Hold a wedding feast, even if with a goat
(only)’ (Al-Asqalani, n.d.: 367).
In the same way, the linguistic lexical choices emphasizing the paternal power
and gender discrimination are evident in the absence of the bride’s name and
that of her mother. By contrast, the full names initiated with all the titles of the
male guardians of both the bride and groom are usually given. To illustrate, the
mothers’ names of the married couple are not mentioned in the invitations. As a
substitute, the phrase ‘and his wife’ is annexed to the male guardians’ names (i.e.
the inviters). In addition, there is a minimal reference to the bride’s name, which
is commonly subtitled by kariimatuh (his honorable daughter), or by a kinship
term. This tendency (i.e. the deletion of the feminine proper names) more likely
indicates an inherent preference on the part of the groom and bride’s families to
avoid mentioning the names of the females in the invitations, either for religious
or personal preferences. This practice is often witnessed among the nomadic and
rural wedding ceremonies and in conservative urban circles as well as among
religiously-minded men.
Among the Jordanian majority it is preferable not to call a female by name in

front of strangers. Instead, it is better to call her either by her eldest son’s name
or by her husband’s if she is married. In other words, she can be called ?um
(mother) followed by the name of her eldest son, or zawjat (wife of) followed by
her husband’s name. Likewise, men tend not to mention their daughters or
wives’ names in the presence of strangers. A feature that can be gleaned from the
analysis of wedding invitations is that a woman is not an independent entity
having an independent authority. Rather, she is always identified in relation to a
masculine figure, either a ‘daughter of ’, ‘widow of ’, ‘mother of ’, or a ‘sister of ’,
though this practice is not a heritage of Islamic instructions.
According to Janks (1997: 329), ‘all social practices are tied to specific
historical contexts and are the means by which existing social relations are
reproduced or contested and different interests are served’. The consciousness of
long historical and socio-cultural context forms part of the worldview not only of
Arabs but also of most peoples. Thus, these contextual aspects need to be called
upon in discourse as explanation and justification for including certain
components rather than others. For example, the deletion of the bride’s name or
the married couple mothers’ names from the invitation cards could be a survival
of pre-Islamic practices or misinterpretation of the Qur’anic meanings among
the nomads and villagers that have come to be regarded as native to the Arab and
Islamic traditions. Such practices include the false belief that anything related to
the woman is ‘awrah (‘bare and exposed’); therefore, women should stay in their
houses, and should display nothing of themselves. To some degree this pattern
has spread, to the extent that many husbands think that it is somehow shameful
if they mention their daughters or wives by name in public. They also think that
a greater amount of privacy is required for women than for men, especially in the
matter of appearance, social interaction, and daily transactions. This traditional
attitude has its roots in the prominent worry among Arabs that if a woman is not
supervised, and is working independently of the males of her household, she is
open to an approach by other men. Thus, the deletion of the bride’s name or her
mother’s from the invitation cards could be ascribed to the idea that the feminine
space is not a public property; it is considered domestic and should not be part of
any public masculine domain because feminine proper names may function as
an ‘open sesame’ to enter the secrets of the feminine space. Therefore, calling a
woman by her proper name is not open to any male but is restricted to a socially
identified circle (father, husband, brother, etc.).
7. Conclusion and implications

The aim of the research presented here has been to identify and describe the
discoursal practices enacted and reproduced in the visual organization and
verbal presentation of Jordanian wedding invitation texts in order to uncover the
power and control patterns developed and exercised by socio-cultural units. The
study on which this article is based has adopted a genre analysis approach
together with a critical discourse analysis. Employing these combined

approaches, the analyst is in a much better position to describe the generic
component moves of this socio-ritual practice and to understand why and how
each component was employed to construct the wedding invitation text as it is.
This study has intentionally focused on an apparently neutral ritual practice
where the concept of socio-cultural power would not be intentionally fore-
grounded in order to explore the extent of its existence and manifestation.
The genre and critical analyses have revealed the discursive elements of
power which are ritually drawn upon in the process of wedding invitation text
production and interpretation. I found at least two interrelated aspects of cul-
ture, which are of direct importance to wedding discourse: religion and kinship
(in particular, paternal authority). These aspects tend to appear in a hierarchical
order within the generic structure of the wedding invitation. Religious power
usually occupies the highest rank in the wedding invitation, whereas
paternalism is subject to minor authority in relation to religion; that is because
religion has an influence on most aspects of a Moslem’s life, to the extent that in
most Arab societies there is no separation between religion and social life.
Religious power, as the first socio-cultural constraint, is particularly
emphasized among Moslems because respect for religion is carefully ingrained in
children and religious prospects tend to regulate Moslems’ social lives. For
example, Qura’nic injunctions emphasize the formal deference to be owed to
one’s parents. This explains why paternalism and aging are reinforced by the
organization of the text in which ascending generations are before, and even
superior to descending generations (i.e. parents appear before their children in
terms of text organization). Kindness to parents is emphasized by Islam as an
individual act of piety and reiterated in the Holy Quran, as is indicated in the
following verses from the Qur’an:
(23) Wa qaDaa Rabbuka ?allaa ta‘buduu ?illaa ?iyyahu wa bilwaalidayin ?iHsaanaa (24)
wakhfiD lahumaa janaaHa thulli min?arraHmati
(23) Thy Lord hath decreed that you worship none but Him, and that ye be kind to
parents.
(24) And out of kindness, lower to them the wing of humility.
Al-Israa?, verses 23–4
The wedding invitation cards also demonstrated the dominance of the masculine
authority in Jordanian society, in the sense that the roles of men and women are
not distributed equally between them, as men remained the guardians of women
before and after marriage. Marriage in this sense appeared a masculine ritual
through which the masculine power (e.g. father, elder brother) over the bride
before marriage is passed into another masculine domain, in this case, her
husband. However, man’s authority over woman and over other household
affairs does not imply autocratic rights, but duties of care and protection due to
the biological endowment related to the former. Such social values (i.e. duties of
care and protection) are enjoined upon Moslems by the Qur’anic teaching. The
following commonly quoted Qur’anic verse symbolizes this matter:
?arrijaalu qawwaamuuna ‘ala ?anisaa?i bimaa faDDala ?alaahu ba‘Dahum ‘alaa ba‘Din
wabimaa ?anfaquu min ?amwaalihim
‘Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one
more strength than the other, and because they support them from their means.’
Al-Nisa, verse 34
Considered in this light, the wedding invitation genre is shaped by the socio-
cultural beliefs and values, which have a fundamental effect on the organi-
zational details of this communicative event; and an understanding of the
component moves organizing this event, according to Hua et al. (2000), requires
an understanding of the broader social values of the culture in question. Thus,
in order to attempt to understand in some detail how participants construct and
exploit a wedding invitation genre, it is necessary to have knowledge of the social
interactional activities (Foley, 1997) related to this genre. In the case of activities
related to a wedding, we can identify a number of closely related instances of
invitation ceremonies that precede the actual wedding day. Some of the
interesting ones worth considering are Hafl al-khutbah (the engagement party),
during which the groom places a wedding ring on his bride’s finger, and for
which a few relatives and friends are invited; munaasabat katb al-kitab (the signing
of the marriage contract ceremony), which is attended by members of the bride
and groom’s tribes, as well as a large gathering of friends; and Hafl al-wadaa‘ (the
farewell party) which is usually held on the evening before the wedding day itself
by the bride to mark her last day of being single. The relationship between the
marriage ceremony ritual and the related rituals remains unexplored. For
example, the comparison between related invitations such as da‘wit Hafl al-
khutbah (the engagement party invitation), da‘wit katb al-kitab (the signing of the
marriage contract ceremony) and da‘wit Hafl al-wadaa‘ (the farewell party
invitation) are needed. All these will have a number of shared features and may
have a great deal of common ground. The relationship between these related
rituals remains unexplored. Although it is not possible within the scope of this
article to consider these instances of related rituals in detail, it would be
worthwhile for cultural studies to compare similar invitation rituals, not only
intra-culturally, but also cross-culturally. This would add depth to what is known
and may broaden the field of genre analysis research, in that it might uncover to
what extent these related activities could be put together as one genre or could be
regarded as sub-categories of the same genre (Bhatia, 1993). Further research of
ritual patterns in a particular language will manifest how ‘a society chooses and
codifies the acts that correspond most closely to its ideology’ (Todorov’s, 1990:
19); however, in a variety of languages, it would provide solid basis for badly
needed cross-sociocultural analysis, which would ‘greatly aid in efforts toward
intercultural communication’ (Wolfson, 1981: 20).
APPENDIX
A SAMPLE OF JORDANIAN WEDDING INVITATIONS
(1) Opening
(2) Heading
(3) Identifying the inviters
(4) Requesting the presence of others
(5) Identifying the bride and groom
(6) Situating the wedding ceremony
(7) Closing
(8) Other optional components
NOTES
1. Sunna is the legal ways, orders, acts of worshiping and statements of Prophet
Mohammed that have become models to be followed by Muslims.
2. It should be noted here that Arabic adopts a right-left writing and reading orientation
system, but the transliteration system adopted here is the English left-right writing
system. As a result of transliteration, what appears on the left hand is read from right
to left in the original Arabic text.
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M O H A M M E D N A H A R A L - A L I is an Associate Professor in the Department of English for

Applied Studies at the Jordan University of Science and Technology. His PhD thesis from
the Department of Linguistics and English at the University of Durham, UK, focused on
genre, schema and academic writing process. He teaches discourse analysis, functional
grammar, ESP and linguistics and their applications to language teaching. His articles on
genre analysis, register analysis, cross-cultural contrastive rhetoric and pragmatics have
appeared in several international journals. A D D R E S S : Department of English for Applied
Studies, Jordan University of Science & Technology, Irbid, Jordan. [email:
alali@just.edu.jo]

Religious Affiliations and Masculine Power in Jordanian Wedding Invitation Genre

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Religious Affiliations and Masculine Power in Jordanian Wedding Invitation Genre

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A RT I C L E 691

Religious affiliations and masculine

KEY WORDS: critical discourse analysis, genre analysis, socio-cultural factors,

2. The Jordanian wedding ritual pattern

In Jordanian society, the influence of religion, kinship, and paternalism on most

‘genres’ are ‘highly structured and conventionalized constructs’ that can be

4. Data and procedures

5. Generic structure of wedding invitations

wedding invitations has shown the following eight-move rhetorical structure.

The openings of the wedding invitations which were found to be based on

As is shown in the heading above, the wedding is announced as that of ‘Tribe X’

5.3 IDENTIFYING THE INVITER

of the instances checked: in 30 percent it is Hajji, in 16 percent Doctor, in 14

5.4 REQUESTING THE HONOUR OF PARTICIPANTS

5.5 IDENTIFYING THE BRIDE AND THE GROOM

5.6 SITUATING THE CEREMONY

5.8 OTHER OPTIONAL COMPONENTS

Sometimes, there is also a specification of the time of the ceremonial bringing of

The following covert expressions are used:

yumna‘ ?iTlaaq ?al‘iyaarat ?anaariyah

Moreover, for religious reasons, 20 percent of the invitations analyzed included

Having examined the organizational generic structure of Jordanian wedding

6. Conditions of discourse genre production and interpretations

Component Moves Wedding Invitation Text

Identifying the ?alhaaj [X] wa ‘aqiilatuh wa ?aduktoor [Y] wa‘aqiilatuh

Requesting the yatasharafan bida‘watikum liHuDuur Hafl zafaf …

Identifying the Waladihi ?aduktoor kariimatih

Situating the Wa-thaalika bi-mashii?ati-allah fii tamaam ?asaa‘ah ?athaaniyah min

Closing daamat ?al?afraaH Haliifatu diyaarikum ?al‘aamirah

Other optional MulaaHaDah: ?alfaardih ?asaa ‘ah ?alkhaamisah

Similarly, in situating the wedding ceremony component move, the emphasis

Among the Jordanian majority it is preferable not to call a female by name in

7. Conclusion and implications

together with a critical discourse analysis. Employing these combined

A SAMPLE OF JORDANIAN WEDDING INVITATIONS

M O H A M M E D N A H A R A L - A L I is an Associate Professor in the Department of English for

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