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Dr Mandar Marathe

When a PhD Gets Weird: Is “Rhetorical Astonishment” Even a Thing?

📅 Wed 5 August 2026 at 17:47 BST

Mandar Marathe Mandar Marathe DOI: 10.64393/adt.35195.astonishment
📁 Encyclopedia of Arabic Rhetoric
Quranic verse

The central idea behind a PhD is that the student conducts a piece of original research and makes a novel contribution to a field of study. As a consequence, the expectation is that by the end of the PhD, the student is the de-facto world expert in their particular research question.

Sounds… awesome!

But what no-one warned you about is how painfully isolating that process can be.

To give you an example, as part of my PhD, I am creating a taxonomy of Arabic rhetorical devices. And for the past month, I have been intellectually paralysed with one all-pervasive question in my mind:

Or to put it another way, “Is rhetorical astonishment (al-taʿajjub) a thing?”

Should I include astonishment (al-taʿajjub) in my taxonomy of Arabic rhetorical devices or not?

This is not a question I can ask in polite company and expect anyone to take me seriously after that! But this is the reality of what I am grappling with right now.

So, how did I get here? Well, pretty easily, in fact. I found a contemporary Arabic source that mentions astonishment (al-taʿajjub) as a rhetorical device.

The author presumably draws upon centuries of classical Arabic rhetorical scholarship. The author does not explicitly mention his sources, but that is the norm for this type of book, so it’s not a major problem. Several subtypes of astonishment (al-taʿajjub) are described, together with explanations. To seal the deal, a number of illustrative examples are given, including several Qur’anic verses such as the example below. Lots of boxes have been ticked in support of astonishment (al-taʿajjub) as a candidate for the Arabic rhetorical device of the year awards!

“How can you disbelieve in God despite the fact that you were lifeless and He brought you to life” – Qur’an 2:28

This exemplar Qur’anic verse expresses astonishment that mankind could disbelieve in God, after God had created them. Rather than expressing astonishment for its own sake, it uses an expression of astonishment (“How could you do xyz…?!”) to convey a very sober lesson: that the fact of creation is a reason for belief in the creator.

However, on closer inspection, this example is a rhetorical question. That’s a completely different rhetorical device in my taxonomy. Yes, the rhetorical question creates a sense of astonishment, but astonishment is an effect produced by the rhetorical question, not a rhetorical device in itself. Could the esteemed source have made a mistake? Or are my methodology and perspective slightly different?

“Rhetorical mechanisms, not rhetorical effects”

When I first started compiling my taxonomy in 2022, it was evident that I would need a set of rules to work with. I called them my taxonomy’s design principles, and there are (currently) eight of them.

  • Principle Number 4 is that I do not compile a directory of rhetorical effects. Rather, my taxonomy is a directory of rhetorical linguistic mechanisms which result in a wide – and sometimes unpredictable – variety of effects. The rhetorical mechanism is predominant, over the rhetorical effect.

So if rhetorical astonishment was an effect rather than a mechanism, this is a major red flag.

“Always mutawātir, never khabar al-āḥād.”

Another surprising and frustrating thing is that I have not found any other source that mentions “astonishment” (al-taʿajjub) as a rhetorical device. The existing source presents it as a done deal. But other sources – I mean, all the other sources – are silent about it. Some even specifically say in passing that “astonishment” (al-taʿajjub) is not considered to be a rhetorical device. Classical Arabic rhetorical theory considered “astonishment” (al-taʿajjub) from the angle of other devices such as rhetorical questions – like we discovered above – rather than as a stand-alone rhetorical device on its own.

The objective of my taxonomy work is to create a comprehensive directory of Arabic rhetorical devices to aid their identification in texts, in a reproducible way. Therefore I want to include all the Arabic rhetorical devices that exist.

But on the other hand, I am constrained by design principle Number 2 which states, amongst other things, that rhetorical devices must have multiple attestations in the sources. I don’t include a rhetorical device that is found in only one source. A bit like how Islamic theology favours as being more reliable those prophetic hadiths that have reached us from multiple sources (mutawātir) over those which have been transmitted by only one narrator (khabar al-āḥād).

Metaphor and Simile are easily mutawātir. “Astonishment” (al-taʿajjub) stands in the dock today as an alleged khabar al-āḥād.

I say it’s frustrating because in its defence, how can “astonishment” (al-taʿajjub) not be a rhetorical device? Let’s leave aside the arguably ambiguous Qur’anic example above. Consider a constructed example, said in the context of a disappointing meal:

“Wow! That was an amazing meal!”

The speaker is expressing astonishment, and using it rhetorically to create the pragmatic effect of disappointment in the mind of the addressee, who presumably is already aware of the disappointing nature of the meal.

This falls squarely within a major domain of Arabic rhetoric known as ʿilm al-maʿānī. It is an example of a rhetorical mechanism known as ikhrāj al-kalām ʿalā khilāf muqtaḍā al-ẓāhir (literally: “the producing of speech contrary to what the context would normally call for.”) In this case, using positive astonishment to express something negative: shared disappointment.

Does it really matter?

I know what you’re thinking: “This guy’s lost the plot.” After all, a thousand years of scholarship did not address this issue, so why should I? Whether astonishment (al-taʿajjub) counts as a rhetorical device may sound like an exercise in academic hair-splitting that benefits no-one.

But taxonomies become the foundation for everything that follows. If I classify something incorrectly today, future researchers may inherit that mistake. Tiny decisions made today ripple through everything built on top of the taxonomy.

From a scholarly perspective, the decisions I make have to be faithful to the design principles I crafted. Other researchers can then understand that my taxonomy looks the way it does because of the design principles I committed to. The debate then shifts to whether my design principles are sound, rather than an arbitrary, unprincipled discussion about whether a rhetorical device should have been included or not.

So what should I do?

They say a PhD teaches you many transferable skills. Two years into my PhD, I can confirm that it has sharpened my crisis management skills tremendously. The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for any generic PhD crisis has been fully embedded into my psyche:

  • Step 1: Procrastinate for a month, at least, to see if the problem goes away.
  • Step 2: Post about it on my blog and social media, to get sympathy from the universe.
  • Step 3: Suddenly, be ruthlessly decisive: masterfully push the problem into the long grass. Draft a note for your future dissertation along the lines of “we considered ABC but for the reasons of XYZ it was decided to blah blah blah” and file it away until the write-up next year.
  • Step 4: Obnoxiously boast to all your PhD buddies about how you converted an unsolvable problem into rich material for a “Future work” chapter in the dissertation.

Aha so the SOP was always there. And as with any SOP, you just need to follow it!

Until the next instalment of the PhD diaries…

Mandar Marathe

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🔖 #arabic #astonishment #draft_random #rhetoric #taxonomy #ADeeperThought

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