Hadith as Electoral Speech Act: Reception and Political Theology in The ‎‎2024 Mesuji Campaign‎

Abstract

Existing studies on hadith politicization rarely examine how a single local campaign ‎utterance is simultaneously reconstructed textually, enacted performatively, and legitimized ‎theologically, a gap this study addresses through the 2024 Mesuji regental election. The ‎primary data are a verbatim transcript of a regent candidate's campaign speech ‎reconstructing the hadith on caring for orphans, drawn from an official campaign video ‎published on YouTube on 28 October 2024 and triangulated with related news coverage and ‎classical hadith commentaries (Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Riyad al-Salihin). Using ‎qualitative document analysis within a critical discourse analysis frame, the data were ‎examined through four interdisciplinary lenses: hadith reception theory, speech act theory, ‎political theology, and Bourdieu's concept of religious capital, the last of which constitutes ‎this study's principal novelty in linking textual reception to the conversion of religious ‎authority into political capital. The results indicate that the hadith undergoes a functional-‎instrumental reception, wherein its collective social-ethical meaning is reduced into an ‎individualist, transaction-based promise of paradise to secure electoral support. Speech act ‎analysis shows the candidate employing illocutionary strategies to form spiritual ‎commitments and perlocutionary tactics to generate psychological pressure among voters, ‎while political theology analysis reveals this rhetoric converting religious authority into ‎symbolic capital for political power. This study contributes a theoretical model linking ‎hadith reception, performative utterance, and religious capital to explain how sacred texts ‎are instrumentalized in local electoral politics, shifting rational-deliberative democratic ‎discourse toward identity-driven emotional compliance.‎