Abstract
God in the Holy Book, the Quran, announced the Muslims to fight against infidels and disbelievers during the first years of its era. Muhammad (SAW) as the prophet of Islam directed these wars, Jihadi Holy Wars, and received God's directions and guidance during these wars either directly or indirectly. This study aimed to investigate the types and frequency of speech acts and their significant differences used in the verses of the Holy Quran based on Searl's (1969) classification of five speech acts (i.e., expressives, representatives, declaratives, directives, and commissives). The research instrument was a classification of Quranic speech acts including seven categories (i.e., five speech acts and two categories of simple and compound speech acts. Thirty-seven among 444 Jihadi verses were selected through systematic random sampling and analyzed based on their pragmatic meanings. Qualitative and quantitative analyses showed that the most frequent speech act was the expressive function (36%) and the least frequent was the declarative one with 2%. The compound speech acts were 73 percent and the least one was simple speech acts with 27 percent of the whole data. The results of the Chi-square analysis showed that there was a significant difference between the uses of these functions in the Jihadi verses. The implications of this study can help translate, interpret, and analyze the Quran verses of other genres (i.e., divorce and marriage laws criminal and court laws, etc.) in the Holy Quran.
Keywords: The Holy Quran, applied linguistics, jihad, Islam prophet's wars, Searle