But about this same time, we were exposed to an even stranger kind of rhetoric, the rhetoric of the Middle Eastern world…. This was a rhetoric that seemed to play by none of the rules that had come down to us from a tradition of rhetoric that had been practiced by the reigning nations of the Western World for over 2000 years. And then there is the distinctive rhetoric of the Oriental world…. But those are rhetorics that we still have to study and analyze and codify.

—Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (1990), viii.