ABSTRACT
Rhetorical theories have been developed within different cultural traditions, and offer important analytical tools for different fields of study dealing with language, be it in written or oral form. Various rhetorical traditions laid a different focus within their theoretic engagements. But they have also often been influenced by other traditions, and therefore constitute an interesting object of research in a transcultural perspective. This chapter discusses the questions of differentiation of various traditions and understandings of rhetoric and their entanglement on the basis of modern Arabic rhetorical manuals from Egypt which have been published since the beginning of the twentieth century and are widespread in the Arab world today. These manuals are transcultural in so far as they draw on the autochthonous tradition of Arabic rhetoric (ʿilm al-balāgha), on the Arabic reception of Greek rhetorical theory between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, on the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, and on modern European rhetorical literature – which has also developed from the Greco-Roman tradition.
