Reframing Arbaeen Pilgrimage in Western Media through a Cultural Translation: A Framing Analysis

As the world’s largest annual human gathering, Arbaeen pilgrimage is fast becoming aninternational event in which, according to several pieces of published news in some of theworld’s top news agencies such as Independent, a number of people apart from Muslimcountries, from several non-Muslim Asian, American, African and European countriesparticipate. This remarkable event has adequate news values including impact, magnitudeand bizarreness, but it is underrepresented and/or misrepresented by the western media. Itdeserves to be systematically discussed in academic discourse. This study made an attemptto situate Western media’s representation of Arbaeen within the reframing theory by Baker(2006)and the theory of cultural translation as introduced by Homi Bhabha (1994). Themain research question to be pursued by this study was how Arbaeen pilgrimage has beenreframed through a cultural translation by Western media in the last 10 years (from 2007to 2017). To this end, news stories of the world’s top 10 news agencies covering Arbaeenpilgrimage were chosen as the corpus of this study. The corpus then was analyzed accordingto Baker’s (2006) narrative theory of translation that views translation as a reframingpractice. Unlike the mainstream idea that Arbaeen pilgrimage is underrepresented by theWestern media, the central argument here was that it is reconstructed and reframed withinnegative news stories and introduced to unknown audiences as a dangerous event, whilethis is a narrative with multiple positive implications including peace and solidarity amongthe nations with volunteers distributing free food and drinks to pilgrims, as well as offeringplaces to relax, wash, and sleep only for Imam Hussein.