Prof. Dr. Hassan al-Akili, a faculty member at the department of Arabic language received recently the award for the second best academic research in the Third Ghadir Festival held under the slogan (Ghadir: Will of Heaven) sponsored by Thought Center for Dialogue and Reform in Baghdad which is an independent center that seeks to create awareness in citizenship. Dr. Hassan al-Akili presented a research paper entitled (The semantic cohesion in war speeches of Imam Ali (PBUH). In this study, he tried to apply the rules of textuality to an ancient Arabic text of high-level originality and eloquence authored by Imam Ali (PBUH), where the researcher defined many war speeches from the linguistic and the historical perspectives in relation with the political reality of the Islamic nation. Then Dr. Hassan al-Akili applied one of the seven criteria of text functionality created by the two linguists: Robert-Alain de Beaugrande and Wolfgang U. Dressler, i.e, cohesion after verifying the text documentation and reference while studying Nahj al-Balagha (that is the most famous collection of sermons, letters, interpretations and narrations of Imam Ali).
The researcher pointed out that the purpose of textuality is to understand the grammatical and semantic correlations that go beyond the single sentence into a short or long series of sentences that compose a flexible, coherent and harmonious text which is the case with the Arabic text in general, adding that the Imam’s character was the same in style, substance, courageous ideals and high morals, committed to the principles of Islam and what the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), linking religion to politics, where it was forbidden to insult anyone or cutting off water to an enemy or a tree, asserting that beating women, children or the wounded is forbidden.
