Concepts of "Freedom", "Power" and "Leadership" in the Arabic Folklore as an Archetypal Element in Political Culture of the Middle East

This article presents a critical analysis of such archetypal concepts as "freedom", "power" and "leadership" in the Arab-Muslim folklore.The authors of the article have conducted a structural and semantic analysis of proverbs using conceptual, comparative-historical and anthropological methods and studied significant fragments of Mağma ‘al-'amṯāl (collection of proverbs dated back to the 12th century) compiled by the well-known Muslim linguist al-Maydānī. They have distinguished a special group of proverbs that reflect an attitude to power, personal freedom, the leader's authority and other social culture-bound concepts typical of the pre-Islamic and Arab-Muslim medieval civilization. This study is crucial since it enables to identify prototypes of the modern Arabic political culture based on archetypal elements of the collective mindset.