Arabic Jinās is not Pun, Wortspiel, Calembour, or Paronomasia: A Post-Eurocentric Approach to the Conceptual Untranslatability of Literary Terms in Arabic and Ancient Egyptian Cultures

This article amplifies the call for a paradigm shift across a range of comparative disciplines relevant to non-European cultures, that decentralizes rhetorical concepts from European traditions in comprehending non-European literary and philosophical practices. Such a post-Eurocentric perspective is necessary to both generate a fair comparative module that centralizes the emic (culture-specific) features of a language and to avoid Eurocentric misrepresentation of the non-European culture under consideration. This paper challenges the common academic position that Eurocentric traditions are foundational to understanding ancient Egyptian and Arabic literary systems. The article also considers the graphic nature of the core hieroglyphic script in comparison with Arabic to refute the modern obsession that concentrates on the verbal layers of the scripts and neglects their visual literariness.