A Pragma-Stylistic Analysis of Muhammad Asad's The Road to Mecca

Abstract

The Road to Mecca (1954), Muhammad Asad’s autobiography, written in elegant, highly evocative English prose, is a masterpiece of literary style bursting with tenderness and thoughts emanating from a profound spiritual and existential experience. In a combination of pragmatics and stylistics, the current study explores the effectiveness of language, style and authorial illocutionary intents. The rich literary style of the text is to be understood within its larger contexts: linguistic, thematic, and emotional in addition to the physical and cultural environments. The analyzed book, in its elegant, unobtrusive and subtle style, adds a great deal to emphasizing the common humanistic factors of all civilizations. The current study focuses on the literary style of the writer and its pragmatic effects to fill in a gap in previous studies which only focused on the religious and intellectual values of Asad’s writings in general. It is an attempt to prove that The Road to Mecca is more of a work of art than a travelogue or religious proselytizing.