When Critique is Not Critical: The Concept of Adab as a Contribution to Analytical Criticality in Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Critique constitutes the foundation of criticality in Discourse Analysis (CDA). However, within the Malay communicative culture, criticism is often understood through the lens of politeness, as pointing out weaknesses may threaten face, dignity, and social harmony. Consequently, direct criticism is readily equated with condemnation or fault-finding. In response to this issue, the researcher formulates a critique grounded in the concept of adab, drawing upon the thought of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas as a principle of analytical accountability in CDA. This qualitative study adopts a metacritical approach to examine 11 analytical responses written by postgraduate students (n=11) for a CDA assignment on a postnatal care product advertisement. The analysis was conducted in two stages. First, a referential analysis of the advertisement was carried out to demonstrate the relationship between the text, linguistic or semiotic evidence, interpretation, and social explanation. Second, a metacritical analysis of the students’ responses was undertaken based on four conditions of criticality: sensitivity to meaning-related injustice, evidence accountability, explanation of discursive mechanisms, and emancipatory orientation. The findings reveal that the advertisement associates the postpartum female body to the husband’s fidelity through an implicit condition-goal structure, a bouletic orientation, and the distribution of agency. The students’ responses, however, exhibited several limitations, as the text itself was not treated as the object of analysis, interpretation did not develop into explanations, theory was not operationalised, and critical evaluations were not substantiated with linguistic or semiotic evidence. This paper contributes to the decolonisation of CDA by proposing adab as a principle of analytical accountability without abandoning systematic evidence-based analysis.

Keywords: Critical discourse analysis, adab, critique, decolonisation, analytical accountability, advertising discourse