Investigating the place of entrepreneurship in Arabic proverbs: with a rhetorical approach

In a world that is constantly growing and evolving, entrepreneurship plays an important role in the development of societies. This category is one of the emphasized axes in folk culture and oral literature. A proverb is an outstanding example of folk culture that refers to various phenomena of society with a short and melodious structure derived from a folk story. In some Arabic proverbs, direct or indirect reference is made to the most important entrepreneurial indicators such as hard work, wisdom, responsibility, individualism, opportunism and income generation, which adds to the importance of research on this issue. In the present research, an attempt is made to examine the entrepreneurship category in 200 selected Arabic proverbs by relying on the descriptive-analytical method and to extract their most important directions by emphasizing the foundations of rhetoric. The results show that the high frequency of hard work (32%) and wisdom (23%) in the discussed proverbs indicates the importance of work and effort combined with wisdom and reason among Arabs. From the rhetorical point of view, the high frequency of descriptive orientation (47%) and motivational orientation (34%) shows the development of the Arab society in explaining the working conditions to the audience and motivating and encouraging them to make continuous efforts and avoid laziness.