Beyond Western-Oriented Communication Theories A Normative Arab-Islamic Perspective

Abstract

For many decades, communication as a theoretical field of study has been dominated by Western-oriented perspectives that arose in the context of media perceptions in Western Europe and North America. Western communication theories have been promoted around the world as possessing a strong element of universa-lism. In recent years, this approach has been challenged on the basis of obfuscating the cultural peculiarities of non-Western societies as significant components of communication theorisation. In this article, the author presents a normative Arab-Islamic perspective as a basis for future communication theory building in the Arab-Islamic context. Drawing on the notion of “Worldview,” the Arab-Islamic perspective identifies four antithetical conceptual constructs that bear on the nature of communication: individualism-conformity, transcendentalism-existentialism, intuitive-rational processes, and egalitarianism-hierarchy. The author concludes that Arab-Islamic communication patterns are formalistic, indirect, hyperbolic, asymmetrical, metaphysical and orally biased.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 70 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.