The Excellence of the Arabs
The Excellence of the Arabs is a spirited defense of Arab identity—its merits, values, and origins—at a time of political unrest and fragmentation, written by one of the most important scholars of the early Abbasid era.
The Excellence of the Arabs can productively be read as a circling of the wagons to defend the social prestige of Arabness in the waning political system of the centralized Abbasid caliphate. In the earlier period of substantial political unity and tremendous economic opportunity, the political structure had been dominated by Arab groups. The association of current decline with the rise of the Turks, and the commensurate association of bygone prosperity with the old Arab elites, would have weighed on the minds of Ibn Qutaybah, his peers, and perhaps even the Caliph al-Muʿtamid himself. If the caliphate was to be revived, was a return of the Arab elites necessary?
The Excellence of the Arabs can productively be read as a circling of the wagons to defend the social prestige of Arabness in the waning political system of the centralized Abbasid caliphate. In the earlier period of substantial political unity and tremendous economic opportunity, the political structure had been dominated by Arab groups. The association of current decline with the rise of the Turks, and the commensurate association of bygone prosperity with the old Arab elites, would have weighed on the minds of Ibn Qutaybah, his peers, and perhaps even the Caliph al-Muʿtamid himself. If the caliphate was to be revived, was a return of the Arab elites necessary?
In the cosmopolitan milieu of Baghdad, the social prestige attached to claims of being Arab had begun to decline. Although his own family originally hailed from Merv in the east, Ibn Qutaybah (213-76 H/828-89 AD) locks horns with those members of his society who belittled Arabness and vaunted the glories of Persian heritage and culture. Instead, he upholds the status of Arabs and their heritage in the face of criticism and uncertainty.
The Excellence of the Arabs is in two parts. In the first, Arab Preeminence, which takes the form of an extended argument for Arab privilege, Ibn Qutaybah accuses his opponents of blasphemous envy. In the second, The Excellence of Arab Learning, he describes the fields of knowledge in which he believed pre-Islamic Arabians excelled, including knowledge of the stars, divination, horse husbandry, and poetry. And by incorporating extensive excerpts from the poetic heritage—“the archive of the Arabs”—Ibn Qutaybah aims to demonstrate that poetry is itself sufficient corroboration of Arab superiority.
- By the time Ibn Qutaybah was in his thirties, the Turkic generals had seized opportunities for personal gain, and instability, intrigue, and regicide followed. Five caliphs in succession were murdered between 247/861 and 256/870; the wider Iraqi economy deteriorated; and caliphal central authority declined sharply as many regions of the empire, including North Africa, Egypt, Arabia, and eastern Iran, asserted increasing local autonomy. the negative opinions he expresses of some of his contemporaries suggest that the political and economic decline during his lifetime made him aware that the “good old days” of Abbasid power were past.
- In the early second/eighth century, Arab identity became widely invoked to connote an elite, conqueror status and, since very few of the conquered peoples converted during Islam’s first century, it also laid claim to Islam as the “Arab faith.” Many urban Iraqis identified themselves as “Arabs” by claiming lineage (real or perhaps imagined) to Arabian tribes. Specialists of Arabic poetry, genealogy, and history such as al-Aṣmaʿī (d. 213/828), Abū ʿUbaydah (d. 210/825), and Ibn al-Kalbī (d. 204/819) began the process of creating a sense of pan-Arabian, pre-Islamic Arab identity, and repackaged a vast lore from preIslamic times into an imagined origin story about the Arabs.
-Ibn Qutaybah wrote The Excellence of the Arabs some 150 years after Arab identity had been well established, and he drew most of his source material from the opinions and anecdotes from these late second/eighth century specialists. He wrote it just as many of his contemporaries began to drop the sense of Arabness from their identity. They spoke and wrote in Arabic, but they were dissociating themselves from a sense of Arab community. Instead of counting themselves as members of an Arab race (expressed in terms of Arab ummah, jīl, or nasab [Arab “people” or “kin”]), the majority of Iraqis were choosing instead to identify by their locale, profession, or sectarian affiliations—or, more upsetting to Ibn Qutaybah, by Persian and other ethnic affiliations.2 The reasons behind the changes in self-perception and presentation were manifold: Iraq was a cosmopolitan place, and the mixing of populations in its great cities, especially Baghdad and Basra, would have made it difficult to maintain pure tribal/racial lineages for long. Baghdad in particular had expanded massively since its founding in the 760s; by the time Ibn Qutaybah wrote The Excellence of the Arabs, many of these immigrants had little or no sentiment of Arabness. Ibn Qutaybah’s contemporaries also lived at least a generation after the official termination of the dīwān al-ʿaṭāʾ, an official state stipend which the caliphate had paid to the descendants of the original Muslim conquerors of the Middle East.
-In an intriguing contrast to political and social factors that were eroding the value of Arabness as a social asset, intellectually the star of Arabic was rising. Abbasid-era Muslim identity was underwritten by distinctly Arab cultural capital: the Qurʾan was in Arabic, Ibn Qutaybah’s peers firmly believed that Muḥammad was an Arab prophet, and they memorialized early Islam as a movement that established a simultaneously Arab and Muslim rule over the Middle East.
-The Bigots Ibn Qutaybah never names his opponents individually, choosing instead to label them all “Shuʿūbīs,” a term which we render in English, for reasons that will become clear, Bigots. The Arabic term al-Shuʿūbiyyah (“Shuʿūbism”) and the related term “Shuʿūbī,” or partisan of Shuʿūbism, have exercised the imagination of scholars. Scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Shuʿūbism as a form of premodern Iranian nationalism. Hamilton Gibb, acknowledging the shortcomings of the nation-state as a prism for analyzing medieval Iraq, proposed that the Shuʿūbist “movement” was in fact a reflection of competing cultural values and a struggle over the “inner spirit of Islamic culture.” In Gibb’s influential interpretation, the Shuʿūbīs were a group touting egalitarianism, while at the same time seeking to promote Sasanian institutions and values as models for the caliphate to emulate.7 In the sources, the label Shuʿūbism is applied mainly to Abbasid insiders living during the late eighth and early ninth centuries—but it is applied retrospectively, including by other Abbasid insiders, to persons they considered bigoted (thus prompting our use of the term “Bigots”). Lexicographers repeat the statement that a “Bigot” [Shuʿūbī] is someone who belittles the significance of the Arabs and who does not see them as having precedence over others.
Easterners - We are on somewhat firmer ground with “ʿAjam.” Etymologically, it is related to words for an incomprehensible sound, or silence. When Ibn Qutaybah and his contemporaries marshalled the word, they often had in mind peoples possessed of ʿujmah, that is, a confused and unclear way of speaking. As this was usually intended as contrast to the clear eloquence of Arabic speakers, ʿAjam thus at times conveyed a pejorative sense. From the contexts in which he uses it in The Excellence of the Arabs, Ibn Qutaybah seems primarily concerned with peoples from further east, whom we might call “Iranians,” though this was not a term Ibn Qutaybah himself would have used since the parameters of “Iranian” identity were the product of much later times. On occasion, he specifies the people of Fārs (i.e., “Persians” from the southwest quadrant of the Iranian plateau, the traditional homeland of the pre-Islamic Sasanian Empire) as being included among the ʿAjam; elsewhere he extends the term’s ambit to the northeastern Iranian region of Khurasan, although he also notes the inhabitants of Khurasan should not be confused with Persians.
The flow of the argument is now straightforward: each section opens with a brief description of the nature of the specific field of learning in question, followed by examples demonstrating the Arabs’ cultivation of it and their wide expertise. Some of the examples take the form of short anecdotes and prose statements, but the majority of the evidence consists of lines of poetry. This was a common approach developed by Arabic writers, who considered poetry, as “the archive of the Arabs” (dīwān al-ʿArab), the most truthful and most bountiful source of Arab knowledge. Poetry also had a distinct empirical appeal; stories were accepted as definitively true only if they were corroborated by poetry. Much of classical Arabic literature has in fact been prosimetric, that is, consisting of a mixture of prose and accompanying poetic corroboration.
- By the time Ibn Qutaybah was in his thirties, the Turkic generals had seized opportunities for personal gain, and instability, intrigue, and regicide followed. Five caliphs in succession were murdered between 247/861 and 256/870; the wider Iraqi economy deteriorated; and caliphal central authority declined sharply as many regions of the empire, including North Africa, Egypt, Arabia, and eastern Iran, asserted increasing local autonomy. the negative opinions he expresses of some of his contemporaries suggest that the political and economic decline during his lifetime made him aware that the “good old days” of Abbasid power were past.
- In the early second/eighth century, Arab identity became widely invoked to connote an elite, conqueror status and, since very few of the conquered peoples converted during Islam’s first century, it also laid claim to Islam as the “Arab faith.” Many urban Iraqis identified themselves as “Arabs” by claiming lineage (real or perhaps imagined) to Arabian tribes. Specialists of Arabic poetry, genealogy, and history such as al-Aṣmaʿī (d. 213/828), Abū ʿUbaydah (d. 210/825), and Ibn al-Kalbī (d. 204/819) began the process of creating a sense of pan-Arabian, pre-Islamic Arab identity, and repackaged a vast lore from preIslamic times into an imagined origin story about the Arabs.
-Ibn Qutaybah wrote The Excellence of the Arabs some 150 years after Arab identity had been well established, and he drew most of his source material from the opinions and anecdotes from these late second/eighth century specialists. He wrote it just as many of his contemporaries began to drop the sense of Arabness from their identity. They spoke and wrote in Arabic, but they were dissociating themselves from a sense of Arab community. Instead of counting themselves as members of an Arab race (expressed in terms of Arab ummah, jīl, or nasab [Arab “people” or “kin”]), the majority of Iraqis were choosing instead to identify by their locale, profession, or sectarian affiliations—or, more upsetting to Ibn Qutaybah, by Persian and other ethnic affiliations.2 The reasons behind the changes in self-perception and presentation were manifold: Iraq was a cosmopolitan place, and the mixing of populations in its great cities, especially Baghdad and Basra, would have made it difficult to maintain pure tribal/racial lineages for long. Baghdad in particular had expanded massively since its founding in the 760s; by the time Ibn Qutaybah wrote The Excellence of the Arabs, many of these immigrants had little or no sentiment of Arabness. Ibn Qutaybah’s contemporaries also lived at least a generation after the official termination of the dīwān al-ʿaṭāʾ, an official state stipend which the caliphate had paid to the descendants of the original Muslim conquerors of the Middle East.
-In an intriguing contrast to political and social factors that were eroding the value of Arabness as a social asset, intellectually the star of Arabic was rising. Abbasid-era Muslim identity was underwritten by distinctly Arab cultural capital: the Qurʾan was in Arabic, Ibn Qutaybah’s peers firmly believed that Muḥammad was an Arab prophet, and they memorialized early Islam as a movement that established a simultaneously Arab and Muslim rule over the Middle East.
-The Bigots Ibn Qutaybah never names his opponents individually, choosing instead to label them all “Shuʿūbīs,” a term which we render in English, for reasons that will become clear, Bigots. The Arabic term al-Shuʿūbiyyah (“Shuʿūbism”) and the related term “Shuʿūbī,” or partisan of Shuʿūbism, have exercised the imagination of scholars. Scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Shuʿūbism as a form of premodern Iranian nationalism. Hamilton Gibb, acknowledging the shortcomings of the nation-state as a prism for analyzing medieval Iraq, proposed that the Shuʿūbist “movement” was in fact a reflection of competing cultural values and a struggle over the “inner spirit of Islamic culture.” In Gibb’s influential interpretation, the Shuʿūbīs were a group touting egalitarianism, while at the same time seeking to promote Sasanian institutions and values as models for the caliphate to emulate.7 In the sources, the label Shuʿūbism is applied mainly to Abbasid insiders living during the late eighth and early ninth centuries—but it is applied retrospectively, including by other Abbasid insiders, to persons they considered bigoted (thus prompting our use of the term “Bigots”). Lexicographers repeat the statement that a “Bigot” [Shuʿūbī] is someone who belittles the significance of the Arabs and who does not see them as having precedence over others.
Easterners - We are on somewhat firmer ground with “ʿAjam.” Etymologically, it is related to words for an incomprehensible sound, or silence. When Ibn Qutaybah and his contemporaries marshalled the word, they often had in mind peoples possessed of ʿujmah, that is, a confused and unclear way of speaking. As this was usually intended as contrast to the clear eloquence of Arabic speakers, ʿAjam thus at times conveyed a pejorative sense. From the contexts in which he uses it in The Excellence of the Arabs, Ibn Qutaybah seems primarily concerned with peoples from further east, whom we might call “Iranians,” though this was not a term Ibn Qutaybah himself would have used since the parameters of “Iranian” identity were the product of much later times. On occasion, he specifies the people of Fārs (i.e., “Persians” from the southwest quadrant of the Iranian plateau, the traditional homeland of the pre-Islamic Sasanian Empire) as being included among the ʿAjam; elsewhere he extends the term’s ambit to the northeastern Iranian region of Khurasan, although he also notes the inhabitants of Khurasan should not be confused with Persians.
The flow of the argument is now straightforward: each section opens with a brief description of the nature of the specific field of learning in question, followed by examples demonstrating the Arabs’ cultivation of it and their wide expertise. Some of the examples take the form of short anecdotes and prose statements, but the majority of the evidence consists of lines of poetry. This was a common approach developed by Arabic writers, who considered poetry, as “the archive of the Arabs” (dīwān al-ʿArab), the most truthful and most bountiful source of Arab knowledge. Poetry also had a distinct empirical appeal; stories were accepted as definitively true only if they were corroborated by poetry. Much of classical Arabic literature has in fact been prosimetric, that is, consisting of a mixture of prose and accompanying poetic corroboration.