Discourse-level evidentiality in Saudi legal judgments: intertextual authority chains in Islamic legal discourse

Abstract This article examines how evidential authority is textually constructed in contemporary Saudi legal judgments. Instead of treating evidentiality as a narrowly grammatical category, it develops a discourse-level account of how Arabic legal judgments encode source, reliability, institutional standing, and normative force through citation, attribution, and genre sequencing. The corpus comprises Volume 2 of the Collection of Judicial Rulings 1435 H, including 90 case entries in 512-pages published by the Ministry of Justice, Saudi Arabia. Eighty-four complete first-instance rulings were available for structural analysis. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and independently checked manual coding, the study proposes a five-tier Intertextual Authority Chain (IAC): Prophetic hadith, classical fiqh maxims, state statutes, institutional or expert reports, and testimonial statements. Quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate that these sources are functionally differentiated: testimony constructs the factual record, institutional reports corroborate or qualify disputed facts, statutes anchor procedure and jurisdiction, and fiqh maxims frequently operate to convert evidential uncertainty into a legally actionable conclusion. The study contributes to evidentiality research and Arabic legal discourse analysis by offering a replicable framework for comparing the textual distribution of sacred, juristic, statutory, administrative, and testimonial authority in Islamic legal writing.