Online Fatwas of Fatua.kz: A Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This article examines the online fatwas of fatua.kz, the official fatwa portal of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kazakhstan (SAMK), through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); digital religious authority and the discourse of "state-endorsed Islam" remain a salient issue in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. The study aims to uncover the linguistic-rhetorical structure and discursive strategies of fatua.kz fatwas, focusing on the thematic profile, the evidential base, the rhetorical schema, and discursive frames. Its scientific significance lies in the first systematic study of Kazakh-language Islamic digital media discourse combining CDA with computational-linguistic tools, and its practical significance in providing a basis for understanding SAMK’s digital communication. The methodology is primarily qualitative – Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Entman’s framing theory – complemented at an exploratory level by automated thematic classification and VADER sentiment analysis (n=192). The corpus comprises n=285 fatwas from the portal’s question-and-answer section (2024–2025; mean length 541 words), with coding reliability verified by a second independent coder (mean κ=0.74). The analysis finds a dominance of worship and ritual questions (about 46%), an evidential base resting on the Quran (about 56%) and hadith, and a stable six-component rhetorical schema. The VADER result (65.6% positive) is interpreted not as a measure of tone but as a methodological observation that the algorithm over-detects positivity in religious-legal lexis. The study’s value is its empirical demonstration that fatua.kz operates as a one-directional channel consolidating official religious authority through concrete discursive mechanisms (the six-component schema, the "nass + sunna" evidential hierarchy, and the absence of feedback). The conclusions are applicable in religious-education programmes, in refining SAMK’s digital-communication strategy, and in research on Islamic digital media.

Keywords: Online fatwa, discourse analysis, fatua.kz, SAMK, digital Islam