Muslim preachers’ pandemics related discourses within social media: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis

Abstract Pandemics have been extensively represented in different discourse genres including journalistic discourse, media discourse, medical discourse, social media discourse, and academic discourse. This study explores the representation of COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox in the Arab Muslim preachers’ discourses on Twitter and Facebook. The Muslim preachers’ discourses remain one of the influential discourses that informs the ideology of its believers, as it is largely based on the Islamic authoritative discourses of the Quran and the Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. The data set of 538 postings was generated through an extended observation of purposively recruited Arab Muslim non-mainstream scholars’ postings on Facebook and Twitter from March 2019 to August 2022. The data were analyzed using corpus-based critical discourse analysis. The twofold analytical lens involving CL and CDA revealed that Muslim preachers frequently used ideological semantic patterns in communicating to the Muslim society at large regarding the pandemics. The utilized semantic patterns emerged as embedded in certain ideological frames established in the Islamic authoritative discourses of the Quran and the Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. In their ideological representation of the pandemics, Muslim preachers framed the entire three pandemics mostly as the wrath of God. Religious scholars’ postings cannot be considered an account of teaching and preaching; rather, they merely consume and produce Islamic ideology in a way to manipulate and influence Muslims’ knowledge of existing reality by adding new meanings in line with the chosen ideological frames.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abdulfattah Omar is an Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of English, College of Science & Humanities, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University (KSA).Also, he is a standing Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Port Said University, Egypt.Dr. Omar received his PhD degree in computational linguistics in 2010 from Newcastle University, UK.His research interests include computational linguistics, literary computing, and digital humanities.

Introduction
Religious discourse plays an important role in the life of millions around the world, especially in the Muslim world, as the majority of Muslims believe Islam as a complete code of life (Hashmi et al., 2021;Rashid et al., 2018).Over the long history of Islam, religious discourses have shown the potential of influencing millions of Muslims around the world by shaping and strengthening their ideological viewpoints (Bakar et al., 2017;Hashmi et al., 2020).Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have attracted the attention of preachers and religious scholars to utilize these interactive platforms to disseminate their religious standpoints on the contemporary issues (Hashmi et al., 2020;Rashid et al., 2018).In recent years, COVID-19 pandemic has occupied a considerable space in the Muslims' religious sermons (Hashmi et al., 2023) and recent outbreaks of Swine flu and monkey pox may have also drawn the attention of religious scholars.Muslim scholars' religious discourse has been able to promote certain ideological standpoints among the Muslims on certain regional and global incidents.The social media platforms have equally equipped the Muslim preachers to address Muslims, to mobilize them for certain religious and political goals (Bakar et al., 2017;Scardigno & Giuseppe, 2020), and to disseminate certain ideological orientations (Awan, 2016;Koura, 2018).In other words, social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter are frequently used to express more subjective opinions and thus, the framing of religious and social discourses is not always without an agenda (Hashmi et al., 2021;Kgatle, 2018).Today, many religious scholars use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to express their opinions on contemporary global issues.Muslim preachers, in particular, often use Islamic authoritative frames to represent human suffering in their ideological discourses (Hashmi et al., 2023) and thus, these Muslim scholars' postings within social media seem to have a strong potential of framing ideological representations of the COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey Pox pandemics.
The concept of framing is closely associated with agenda setting, as social media content is constructed to shape persuasive narratives that can significantly influence public opinions and beliefs, thereby shaping the reality that surrounds them (Baden, 2010;Entman, 2007;Hallahan, 1999;Hashmi et al., 2022;McQuail & Deuze, 2020).Baden (2010) has pointed out that applying frames not only contributes to the construction of social meanings but also amplifies belief systems.Framing strategies are considered to be used to manipulate the existing information of the target audience in order to regulate and control their belief systems.Entman (2007) defines framing as the process of minimizing certain aspects of perceived reality and emphasizing new aspects to maximize the influence of the associations that endorse a certain perception.This definition implies that through framing, social media users can persuasively influence the audience to see reality through a certain religious, political, or social frame, and framing the ideological representation of the pandemics by Muslim preachers is no exception.
The language and framing used by Muslim preachers on social media platforms to represent pandemics such as Swine flu, COVID-19, and Monkey pox are of particular interest.Further examination of their use of social media and the impact of their messaging is necessary to fully understand how these religious scholars are influencing public discourse and shaping the religious narrative on these issues.This study is limited to the discourses of Muslim preachers who use social media to express their religious opinions within the context of Saudi Arabia.It should be noted that the Sunni schools of jurisprudence are the officially implemented, enacted, and accepted theological doctrine in these countries.Therefore, Muslim preachers who engage with social media can be considered as the followers of officially implemented theological doctrine.Thus, this study aims to examine the linguistic features and discursive practices used by these preachers to reproduce certain ideologies and frame the pandemics in question.The study also attempts to identify how Muslim preachers employed frames at various levels of the spread of pandemics by answering the following research question: How do the Muslim preachers in Arab countries incorporate ideological frames in the representation of COVID-19, Swine flu and Monkey pox on different levels of outbreak?

Literature review
Religious discourse provides a framework for interpreting events through the lens of a particular religious belief system, offering ideological representations that are shaped by concepts such as divine plan, moral lessons, religious prophecies, and teachings (K.Li & Zhang, 2022).These representations have the potential to shape the way people understand and interpret historical events, which in turn can influence their understanding of contemporary events in the world (Ittefaq & Ahmad, 2018).
Since the advent of social media, religious discourses in Islam have gained significant attention, as Muslim religious scholars now have the opportunity to disseminate their ideas and interpretations of Islamic teachings across various platforms (Ismail et al., 2018;Nisa, 2018).These discourses serve as a framework for producing Muslim ideologies and are considered by Muslims to be a guide for religious understanding and practices (Hashmi et al., 2021;K. Li & Zhang, 2022).In contemporary Muslim societies, Muslim scholars use social media to guide their followers on religious practices and social issues.At times, they engage in debates and dialogues with other scholars and members of the community who challenge their expressed standpoint or require further elaborationAs a result, religious scholars' interpretations can be a powerful tool for shaping Muslims' understanding of religion and contemporary issues (K.Li & Zhang, 2022).
The past few years have seen a growing interest in the representation of Muslims' religious discourses on social media (Khan et al., 2019).The outbreak of various political conflicts around the world that hold Muslims and Muslim countries responsible for the respective unrest has increased the representation of Muslims' discourses both offline and online (Brooks, 2019).The conflicts that emerged after the September 11 attacks, where Muslim groups and countries were accused of the terrorist attacks in the United States of America, provide the best example that has caused a rebirth of Muslims' religious discourses over the past two decades (Bakali, 2019).Since then, different studies have been conducted to explore why Muslims hate the West, following President G. W. Bush's question, "Why do they hate us?" (Bakali, 2019;Olteanu et al., 2018).Consequently, there is an unprecedented interest in the representation of Muslims' ideologies related to intolerance, terrorism, and jihad in religious discourses (Mahmut, 2019;Rubin, 2020).The popularity of Muslims' religious discourses in social media is rooted in the representation of a broad Islamic ideology to compete with other ideologies (Mathew et al., 2019).Due to the unprecedented consumption of social media sites to disseminate religious discourses and promote linked ideologies, it seems difficult now to separate Muslims' religious discourses from the overall use of social media platforms in Muslim countries (Solahudin & Fakhruroji, 2020).
In recent years, numerous studies (e.g.Nisa, 2018;Richards, 2016;Rudner, 2017;Vergani, 2014) have been conducted to investigate the framing of ideologies in Muslims' religious discourses.Social media platforms have provided Muslim preachers and scholars with rare opportunities to convey their messages and ideologies to millions of believers worldwide (Richards, 2016;Vergani, 2014).In this sense, Muslim preachers have utilized social media platforms to convey the ideological representations of global events such as 9/11 and the Tsunami through their religious discourses, which have eventually endorsed and conveyed Muslims' ideologies to millions of users instantly (Nisa, 2018).Due to the influential role in the production and reproduction of Muslim ideologies, religious scholars' discourses caused misinterpretations of terrorism and intolerance while disseminating the ideological concept of jihad in Islam (Rudner, 2017).
In his analysis of the representation of terror in the discourse of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS], Rudner (2017) asserted that constructing religious discourse in social networking sites is considered a form of social practice where the constructed discourse involves an interaction between the discourse producer and its recipients through the encoding/decoding process.Analyzing the social practices of ISIS, Rudner (2017) concluded that social media platforms were extensively used to construct discourses with the purpose of achieving political and economic interests.It was through social media engagement that ISIS convinced many users by reflecting and reproducing Muslims' ideologies in its propagative discourses.
Likewise, Ismail et al. (2018) pointed out that social media platforms enabled religious preachers and scholars to construct different ideologies over the recent years.In this sense, Muslim preachers consider social media as an apparatus to transmit the values and ideologies of Muslim institutions and groups.Therefore, we cannot separate Muslims' ideology from their discourses because ideologies are expressed and reproduced through discourses in online and offline interactions.
The field of discourse studies maintains that language plays a critical role in the process of representation, as it serves as the medium through which events and ideologies are conveyed.As a result, reality is not simply reflected but is instead reproduced through linguistic devices and choices (K.Li & Zhang, 2022).Religious discourses, utilizing these linguistic devices and choices, not only produce and reproduce ideologies but also shape the lives of their adherents (Mathew et al., 2019;Solahudin & Fakhruroji, 2020).It should be noted that the concept of religious discourse as a means of producing ideologies does not imply that religious discourse forces individuals to accept the constructed ideology; instead, the internal persuasiveness of its semantic prosody appeals to the desires, fantasies, self-interest, and faith of its recipients, making religious discourses hegemonic discourses (Halim, 2018).Through the strategy of hegemony, religious institutions play a significant role in propagating particular patterns of faith to sustain the dominance of the dominating class over a society (Nisa, 2018).Moreover, religious discourses, through their powerful semantic prosody, influence, and convince individuals to accept the dominant religious standpoint of their own free will.In this way, religious discourse through social media platforms sustains hegemony by achieving consensus, acceptance, and legitimacy of dominant ideological standpoints (Mathew et al., 2019;Solahudin & Fakhruroji, 2020;K. Li & Zhang, 2022;Hashmi et al., 2023).
With the recent pandemics, such as COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey Pox, social media platforms have become a dynamic tool for interaction between religious scholars from Muslim majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia, and their followers.In particular, the intensive engagement of preachers in constructing religious discourses on social media is evident in the Gulf countries, especially in Saudi Arabia, which is considered the historic center of Islamic ideology (Abdul Cader, 2015;Hashmi et al., 2023).
The above discussion suggests that the fundamental feature of religious discourses is the tone or emotional coloring linked to the conveyed ideology (semantic prosody) through the use of language.Linguistic choices make the discourse powerful and influential for the audience.This study suggests that ideological semantic prosody in the religious discourses of Muslim scholars can have a significant impact on the audience by shaping their emotional response to the constructed discourses.For example, when a religious discourse offers a positive semantic prosody, it may evoke feelings of hope, inspiration, and encouragement in the audience that can make them more positive about the topic being discussed and more open to the ideas being presented (K.Li & Zhang, 2022).On the other hand, when a discourse uses a negative semantic prosody, it may evoke feelings of fear, anxiety, or mistrust in the audience, leading them to be more skeptical of the existing ideas (K.Li & Zhang, 2022).Additionally, semantic prosody can also influence the sense of authority of the audience and credibility of the speaker and thus, a discourse that uses a confident and assertive semantic prosody may be perceived as more credible and authoritative by the audience, whereas a discourse with hesitant or uncertain semantic prosody may be perceived as less credible (Zottola, 2018).
To summarize, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on global health, economy, and social life.As the world grapples with the consequences of the pandemic, the role of social media and the discourses surrounding it have become increasingly important.This is particularly true for Muslim communities, where religious teachings and beliefs can shape attitudes towards pandemics and influence the response to them.Despite the significance of these discourses, there is a lack of research on how Muslim scholars on social media have represented pandemics such as COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox.This gap in the literature is particularly concerning as Muslim communities have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with some studies suggesting that negative attitudes towards vaccines and public health measures have been influenced by conspiracy theories and misinformation spread on social media.To address this gap, this study employs a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to explore the discursive and linguistic choices made by Muslim preachers on social media in their representations of pandemics.In particular, this study uses the cognitive-based discourse analysis (CBDA) framework, which combines CDA with cognitive linguistics, to examine how Muslim scholars construct their messages about pandemics.

Theoretical framework
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) represents one of the areas of increasing importance in various humanities, as the fields of discourse analysis have varied to include the fields of literature, culture, politics and even health and education (Schiffrin et al., 2008).Dealing with discourse as an embodiment of individual in his/her relations with existing institutions and in an ideological context leads towards profound and influential fields of research (Xiao et al., 2019;Yu et al., 2021).The main objective of CDA is to study the relationships between language use and social practices.CDA focuses on the role of rhetorical practices in maintaining social order and social change (Chen & Hu, 2019;F. Li, 2017;Hart, 2010).As an analytical framework for discourse analysis, CDA reinforces the principle that text cannot be understood or analyzed in isolation; rather, it is understood only in relation to other texts and social contexts (van Dijk, 2011).
Representation in discourse studies depends mainly on language as a sign system that includes sounds and written symbols.This system is considered the medium in which we make sense of the world, wherein meanings are produced and exchanged between people (Baker et al., 2013;Bouvier, 2018).The definition of representation by Hartley (2003) suggests that while some representations are uncontroversial, such as the representation of rain in cinema, others may be subject to controversy due to the selection process influenced by cultural and political discourses.For instance, the representation of "race" can vary in different cultural and political contexts.
To understand the ideological representations in discourse studies, one must relate all the terms connected to certain ideology to show how the ideology is regarded as a kind of discourse and how it provides representations of reality, not reality itself, and how it demonstrates its relationship with the connected terms (Zottola, 2018).This study aims to leverage the qualitative and quantitative affordances of corpus-based critical discourse analysis to investigate how Muslim preachers incorporate ideological frames in their discourses on social media to represent pandemics.In recent years, the combination of Corpus Linguistics (CL) and CDA approaches has gained popularity for analyzing ideological discourses (Efe & Ozer, 2015;O'Regan & Riordan, 2018;Zottola, 2018).While presenting an overview of both approaches is beyond the scope of this study, the researchers agree with Zottola (2018) and Liu (2020) that the combination of CL and CDA provides a rich framework for triangulating findings, thereby increasing the reliability of the results and discussion.
CDA not only provides a theoretical framework for understanding the process of discourse construction, but it also offers a unique analytical framework when combined with CL (O' Regan & Riordan, 2018;Yu et al., 2021;Zottola, 2018).This study adopts Fairclough's (1995) threedimensional model, which has been frequently utilized by researchers to analyze ideological discourses due to its availability under the Creative Commons license, providing unrestricted opportunities to use the model and its components for research purposes.The model reveals how discourse is influenced by ideology and power relations.Figure 1 presents the conceptualization of the model for the discourse analysis.
As a theoretical framework, this model presents the construction of discourse as a threedimensional process that involves text, discourse practice, and social-cultural practice (Fairclough, 2001).As an analytical lens, the model proposes three sub-levels of analysis for conducting a critical discourse analysis: "description," "interpretation," and "explanation" (Fairclough, 1995).Description involves the analysis of linguistic features such as the structure of the text; while interpretation entails analyzing discourse practices such as elements of a particular belief system and ideology incorporated in the text's construction.In contrast, explanation pertains to socio-cultural practices that emerge from discourse practices (Fairclough, 1995).Following this model, three steps must be taken in conducting discourse analysis: "description," "interpretation," and "explanation" (Fairclough, 1995).Description involves providing a detailed account of the structural features of the text.Interpretation entails analyzing the process of discourse formation; while explanation refers to analyzing the relationship between discourse and society (Fairclough, 1995).
Given that the objective of this study is to investigate how Muslim preachers ideologically represent the pandemics and incorporate ideological frames in their discourse on social media, combining CL and CDA is deemed an appropriate analytical framework for this research.In the first phase of this study, a quantitative analysis was conducted using CL to identify, compare, and contrast the keywords, collocates, and clusters based on their respective frequencies and "keyness" effect.Simultaneously, in the second phase, a qualitative analysis was performed on the keywords in context to unfold the discourse through the "description" of the text, the "interpretation" of the discourse, and the "explanation" of the socio-cultural practices in relation to society.

Methodology
This study pursues a corpus-based critical discourse analysis approach to examine the linguistic representation of the recent pandemics COVID-19, Monkey pox, and Swine flu in the Muslim preachers' discourses on social media.For the identification of participants of this study, researchers followed famous Muslim religious scholars on Twitter and Facebook in Saudi Arabia.Using the snowball technique, 48 religious scholars were identified who can be described as Muslim Leaders and social media influencers.The status of the identified scholars was reconfirmed by the nine religious scholars of the locality whom the researchers knew personally.The Muslim preachers on social media with "open to public" accounts were retained as the final participants of this study.The participant religious scholars' postings on Facebook and Twitter were observed for six months from February 2022 to August 2022, whereas during this period, the participants' previous postings since March 2019 were gathered as source of corpus in order to gain insights into the potential discursive differences.In this sense, the actual observation of the participants' postings on Facebook and Twitter elapsed over three years which provided a total of 4380 postings.Criteria for the inclusion of postings in this study were developed as: (1) only firsthand postings on the participants' "open to public accounts" are included, and duplicates resulting from shared and retweeted posting are excluded; (2) postings in Arabic language only are included; (3) postings must contain at least one search term from each of the two following groups; (a) ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﻠ‬ ‫ﻪ‬ (God), ‫ﺇ‬ ‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﻪ‬ (God), ‫ﺭ‬ ‫ﺏ‬ (God) (4) postings that consider COVID-19 as a conspiracy against Islam are excluded because such postings deny the existence of pandemics in the Muslims' Holy cities of Makkah and Madinah (see Hashmi et al., 2023).That is not the scope of this study.
As per strict government policies concerning the residents and religion-related matters, researchers argue not to disclose the names or use pseudonyms for official profiles on Facebook and Twitter.In her article for Research Ethics Journal, Willis (2019), who is a researcher at University of Oxford, pointed out that the postings on social media accounts, groups, and pages that are open to public are considered public data as they can be approached without any password nor approval of the respective account holders or the admins and thus can be used for research purposes where waiving off informed consent is justified in terms of research ethics.Similarly, Twitter's privacy statement discloses, "What you say on the Twitter services may be viewed all around the world instantly.You are what you Tweet!"This statement witnesses that Twitter levels no restriction to observing and using non-protected data.The researchers echo these arguments and thus the Muslim preachers' "open to public" postings were considered as public data, with no obligatory informed consent from each religious scholar who publicly posted on Facebook and Twitter.
Regarding the consideration of social media postings as corpus, a "corpus" in general entails the "collections of texts that are stored and accessed electronically" (Hunston, 2002, p. 2), whereas CL refers to as "the study of language based on examples of real life language use" (McEnery & Wilson, 2001, p. 1).It is further emphasized "while agreeing that CL is really a domain of research, it is indeed a methodology, applications of which have been widely recognized now in many areas and theories of linguistics" (Efe & Ozer, 2015, p. 4).The studies that employ CL as methodology are considered corpus-based discourse studies (Liu, 2020;Efe & Ozer, 2015) and thus, the Muslim religious scholars' postings involving the use of real-life language are considered the corpus for this study.
All the postings from the participants were perused in line with the inclusion criteria to constitute a corpus of relevant postings for this study.The audit provided a corpus of 538 relevant postings that was organized into text files in accordance with the requirement of the AntConc, a famous software for corpus linguistic analysis.The corpus was grouped into three sub-corpora: CovCor for Covid-19, SwinCor for Swine flu, and MonCor for Monkey pox.AntConc version 4.1.4(Anthony, 2022) is equipped with a set of tools to identify the linguistic features of the corpus such as word lists, N-grams, key word in context (KWIC) or concordance lines, concordance plots, clusters, collocates, and keywords and their keyness.More specifically, this study leverages the Cluster tool, which helps in identifying the frequent keywords related to the searched terms; the KWIC Tool, which generates the concordance lines to show the searched keywords in their context as they occur in the corpus; the Collocates tool, which provides the collocations of keywords along with their frequencies; and the Plot Tool, which illustrates the occurrences of the keywords in the corpus.These tools provided the discursive patterns related to the pandemics on the two simultaneous stages such as the stage when the pandemics spread out in non-Muslim majority countries such as China, America, and European countries, and the stage when the pandemics reached out to Muslim majority countries such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.
Simultaneously, having analyzed the linguistic features of the corpus through quantitative analysis, this study embarked on Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis to interpret and explain discursive practices and socio-cultural practices.Embarking on Fairclough's (1995) proposition of language as social practice that entails the representation of ideologies and power relations through the language, this study attempts to elucidate the Muslim preachers' ideological representations of the pandemics of COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox in their pandemic-related discourses on social media.

Analysis and discussion
Three major search terms were used as initial keywords as shown in Table 1, in three successive engagements in AntConc for CovCor, MonCor, and SwinCor, respectively, to run the tools of Cluster, KWIC, Plot, Collocates, and Keywords.
This study attempts to explore all the dimensions of ideological representation of the pandemics for which these three corpora are compared and contrasted with one another at the level of clusters, collocates, concordance lines, and keyness of the keywords in spite of the fact that some tools such as Collocate Tool, Cluster Tool, and Concordance lines may provide similar insights into the patterns of semantic representations across the sub-corpora.In a quest to reach potential minute differences in representations that may affect the results of discourse analysis, it is justified to go beyond the selective application of tools in spite of the potential overlaps in the findings.were utilized to identify further keywords in the clusters.Using the advanced setting interface, three-word clusters were identified across the three sub corpora CovCor, SwinCor and MonCor.Figure 2 shows the identified clusters in CovCor.(due to the Uyghurs' killings).The keywords and phrases such as punishment, wrath, enemies, affliction, torture on the Muslims, repentance, Gog Magog and Uyghurs' killings were identified as the key lexical items that structured the semantic patterns of representation of COVID-19.

Utilizing the
Successively, to identify the three word clusters in the MonCor, Cluster Tool in AntConc was run. Figure 3 presents the identified clusters in the MonCor. .Figure 4 shows the identified clusters in the SwinCor.
The identified terms from the clusters in SwinCor are ) and ‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﻮ‬ ‫ﻁ‬ ) 36.10) which represented the homosexuals (see Figure 9).In SwinCor ) collectively represented the reason of God's wrath and contained the third highest keyness.The keywords and respective keyness provided the description of the text across three sub-corpora by showing the analytical effect of religious scholars' chosen lexical items in the construction of discourses.The analysis revealed that the constructed discourses on the pandemics were condensed in terms of ideological terminology related to the conceptualization of God in the Muslim faith and in terms of the excessive use of blame attributing terms as shown in Table 2.
The identification of three-word clusters and significant keywords across the three sub-corpora provided the organized set of rich information for the collocations and concordance lines analysis based on which the research question in this study are answered.

Framing ideological semantic patterns
Based on collocation analysis, the participant Muslims scholars' discourses on the pandemics were interpreted in the light of emerged ideological semantic patterns.Firth (1957) conceptualized the term collocation which he defined as a word which co-occurs with certain other words regularly to produce a collective meaning in its respective context.The constituent words in a collocation are statistically relevant, and the relevance can be calculated using certain statistical measures such as Mutual Information (MI) to seek log-likelihood (Liu, 2020;Baker, 2014).This study also utilizes MI for log-likelihood at the minimum statistical significance P ≤ 0.05, which is the 95 th percentile.Using the advanced setting interface, collocates search was set at a window span of 5 L and 5 R, whereas minimum frequency was set to 4. The interface was engaged in three successive attempts to achieve collocates of the initial keywords (Swine flu) in CovCor, MonCor, and SwinCor, respectively.The generated results included high frequencies of articles, prepositions, and connecting words that were removed in the process of compiling three categories of collocates into a single table as shown in Table 3.
The collocation analysis in the sub-corpora was applied for two main reasons: first, it highlighted other terms within the terminology spectrum related to religious scholars' perceptions of the pandemics, which otherwise might not emerge in the clusters analysis, and secondly, the semantic prosody was retraced by identifying the most frequent terms that collocated with the initial keywords for three sub-corpora.(The Muslims), where Muslims were urged to thank God and offer prayers for not catching the Swine flu because of avoiding pork as it is prohibited in Islam.In this way, the wrath of God was attributed to the Christians, and the Muslims were framed ideologically immune from Swine flu.In this way, the Muslim preachers' discourses presented the Christians as the identified target of Swine flu.The similarity of ideological semantic prosody of the representation of Swine flu with the representations of COVID-19 and Monkey pox can be seen in the patterns of meanings attached that frame the conceptualization of "wrath of God" in accordance with the Muslim faith.This study drew the keyword plots for the three sub-corpora to understand the dispersion of certain ideological keywords across the three corpora which provided the insights into which pandemic was ideologically represented more than the others.The comparison of three plots is shown in Figure 5.
The comparison confirmed the more ideological representation of COVID-19 in the Muslim preachers' discourses on social media than the other two pandemics.The occurrences of ideological terms showed that the discursive construction of COVID-19 by the Muslim preachers was ideologically condensed and thus, it seemed more influential in terms of semantic prosody.

Ideological representation of the pandemics
The Keywords in context (KWIC) tool was exploited to gain rich insights into the context of the emerged keywords that can eventually lead to the critical analysis of the socio-cultural practices underlying the constructed discourses (Baker, 2014;Zottola, 2018).KWIC analysis generated concordance lines containing all the occurrences of the keywords across CovCor, MonCor, and SwinCor that provided contextual insights into the corpus to answer the research question 'how do the Muslim preachers in Arab countries incorporate ideological frames in the representation of the pandemics?The concordance lines of COVID-19 are shown in Figure 6.
The interface setting in AntConc shows fifteen lines on the face without needing to scroll down.In accordance with the identified keywords in the overall corpus of the three pandemics, the concordance lines were thoroughly probed, and the fifteen concordance lines related to COVID-19 were found covering all the keywords.Four main ideological frames emerged from the contexts of keywords related to COVID-19: situating the reasons of COVID-19 in the frame of Muslim faith,

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Religious scholars' use of ideological terms across three sub-corpora.

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.Concordance lines for the keywords in CovCor.

Figure 9 .
Figure 9. Example of the representation of Swine flu.

Table 1 . Initial keywords representing three sub corpora Sub corpora Initial keywords Transliteration English translation
To finalize the cluster analysis, Clusters Tool was run for SwinCor using the initial keyword