Teaching Arabic Rhetoric in Current University Circles: Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

This study is an attempt to clarify the most important ways to achieve creativity in teaching the Arabic language in general, and rhetoric in particular, in the present and future of university education. In this, it is based on the belief that this creativity cannot be achieved except by reviewing the most prominent criticisms that scholars have taken against Arabic rhetoric, which are the criticisms that have justified some modern trends to claim to be heirs to rhetoric, as stylistics did, or to define themselves as “New Rhetorics", as the Argumentation School did, for example. After examining these shortcomings, the study suggests what can be done to deal with them in a way that serves the main purpose, which is creativity in education.

In its aforementioned endeavor, the study uses the descriptive and analytical approach, highlighting ten of the most important criticisms that Arab scholars and others have taken against rhetoric, which many of them like to describe as “traditional,” trying to consider the extent of the objectivity and realism of these criticisms, linking them to the special historical circumstance of the emergence of Arab rhetorical studies. And an attempt to suggest what might make overcoming these drawbacks - if they are real - possible, and even desirable.