If one questions the meanest and commonest of them, he answers
full of arrogance, ‘I am a son of [Bahrám] Chúbín,’
Adding thereto, ‘Khusraw endowed me with goods and made me
his inheritor: who dares to set himself up against me?’”
The Persian aristocracy of this period, as we learn from
al-Mas'údí,*
preserved their genealogies with the same care
as did the Arabs, so that these boasts which so offended the
Arabs may in many cases have been well founded. Even in
the genealogies of the Arabs they were better instructed than
the Arabs themselves, as we see in the anecdote cited by Gold-
“The Earth is dark and the Fire resplendent, and the Fire has been
adored since it became Fire.”
For our knowledge of the Shu'úbí controversy and the literature which it evoked, of which echoes only are preserved in the works of al-Jáḥidh († A.D. 869) and Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi († A.D. 940), we are chiefly indebted to Goldziher's excellent Muhammedanische Studien, already so freely cited in this chapter. Amongst the defenders of the Persian pretensions he enumerates Isḥáq b. Ḥassán al-Khurramí († A.D. 815-16), a native of Sughd, who, in one of his verses, boasts* that his father is Sásán, and Kisrá, son of Hurmuz, and the Kháqán his cousins; Abú 'Uthmán Sa'íd b. Ḥumayd b. Bakhtagán († A.D. 854-5), who composed books on the superiority of the Persians over the Arabs;* Abú Sa'íd ar-Rustamí (tenth century of our era), “in whom,” says Goldziher, “the national cry of the Persians against the Arabs sounds its last notes;” and that great scientist, Abú Rayḥán al-Bírúní († A.D. 1048). Amongst the most notable of their opponents, the champions of Arab superiority, are enumerated the historians Ibn Qutayba († A.D. 883 or 889) and al-Baládhurí († A.D. 892),* both of whom were of Persian origin,* although they wrote exclusively in Arabic. To them may be added a Persian-writing Persian of a later epoch, Náṣir-i-Khusraw, the poet, traveller, and Isma'ílí propagandist († circ. A.D. 1074), who in his Díwán (lith. ed. of Tabríz, A.H. 1280, p. 150), says:—
Bi-dín kard fakhr án-ki tá rúz-i-ḥashr
Bidú muftakhir shud 'Arab bar 'Ajam
Khasís-ast u bí qadr bí-dín, agar
Farídún-sh khál-ast, u Jamshíd 'am.
“'Twas in Religion that he gloried by whom till the Day of
Judgement
The Arabs excel the Persians in glory.
He who lacks religion is ignoble and mean,
Though Ferídún be his maternal, and Jamshíd his paternal
uncle.”
The Shu'úbiyya controversy extended itself, as Goldziher
also shows, to the regions of Genealogy and Philology, wherein
lay the special pride of the Arabs, who valued nothing more
highly than nobility of descent and purity of speech. Even
into these fields the “Iranophiles” carried their attacks, using
their knowledge in the first to rake up all the scandals connected
with the different Arab tribes and the pedigrees of
their favourite heroes and warriors—scandals which were
embodied in a whole series of incriminating poems called
Mathálib—and in the second to vindicate the superiority of
other languages, notably the Persian and the Greek, over
Arabic. To one of the most accomplished of these “Irano-
This most learned philologist, notorious as a Shu'úbí, was always eager to point out how much, even of what they most prized, and esteemed most national and original, the Arabs really owed to other nations; how much, for example, their poetry and rhetoric owed to Persian models, how many of their stories were drawn from Persian sources, and the like. The superior attractions of the Persian legends had, indeed, as we learn from Ibn Hishám (ed. Wüstenfeld, pp. 235-6), already caused the greatest vexation to the Prophet, who found his audiences melt away when an-Naḍr b. al-Ḥárith al-'Abdarí appeared on the scene to tell them tales of Rustam and Isfandiyár and the ancient kings of Persia.
As regards Philology proper, Goldziher specially mentions as champions of the Arab cause the great commentator az-Zamakhsharí (also a Persian: † A.D. 1143-4), who in his preface thanks God for his learning in, and enthusiasm for, the Arabic language, and his exemption from Shu'úbí tendencies; Ibn Durayd († A.D. 933); and Abu'l-Ḥusayn b. Fáris (early eleventh century). Amongst their most notable opponents he reckons Ḥamza of Iṣfahán, who “was enthusiastic for the Persians,”* and who shows his enthusiasm, amongst other ways, by finding Persian etymologies (rarely satisfactory) for names generally regarded as purely Arabic. Thus he explained the name of the town of Baṣra as “Bas ráh” (“Far Road,” or “Many Roads”); an etymology which reminds us of the statement in that late and greatly overestimated Persian work the Dabistán (see pp. 54-55 supra), that the original name of Mecca was “Mah-gah,” which in Persian signifies “the Place of the Moon.” Such childish etymologies are, unfortunately, only too popular with Persian writers down to the present day.
*The way in which the different sciences, especially History, arose amongst the Muslims in connection with the study of the Qur'án, and grouped themselves, as it were, round a theological kernel, is admirably sketched by that great Arabist, Professor de Goeje, in the article on Ṭabari and Early Arab Historians which he contributed to vol. xxiii (1888) of the Encyclopœdia Britannica. The philological sciences naturally come first. With the influx of foreign converts to Islám an urgent need arose for grammars and dictionaries of the Arabic language in which the Word of God had been revealed. To elucidate the meanings of rare and obscure words occurring therein, it was necessary to collect as many as possible of the old poems, which constituted the inexhaustible treasury of the Arabic tongue. To understand these poems a knowledge of the Ansáb, or genealogies of the Arabs, and of their Battles or “Days” (Ayyám) and their history (Akhbár) generally was requisite. To supplement the rules laid down in the Qur'án for the conduct of life, it was necessary to find out, by questioning his “Companions” (Aṣḥáb), or those who had associated with them and “followed” them (Tawábi', tubbá' or tábi'ún), what the Prophet had said and how he had acted under different circumstances; whence arose the science of Tradition (Ḥadíth). To test the validity of these traditions it was necessary to know not merely the content (matn) of each, but also its isnád, i.e., the chain of persons through whom it had been handed down ere it was finally reduced to writing; and to test this isnád a knowledge of the dates, characters, and circumstances of these persons was requisite, which again led in another way to the study of Biography and Chronology. Nor did the history of the Arabs alone suffice; it was necessary to know something of the history of their neighbours, especially the Persians, Greeks, Ḥimyarites, Æthiopians, &c., in order to grasp the significance of many allusions in the Qur'án and in the old poems. A knowledge of Geography was essential for the same purpose, and also for more practical reasons connected with the rapid expansion of the Muhammadan Empire.
During the first century after the flight hardly any books were written; all this knowledge continued to be handed down orally, and the Qur'án remained almost the only prose work (and it is chiefly written in rhymed prose) in Arabic. Such as desired to study Arabic philology, poetry, and legend had to go into the Desert amongst the Bedouin tribes to pursue their researches; such as sought a knowledge of Tradition and the religious sciences had to seek it at Madína. Knowledge could only be obtained by travelling, and this travelling “in search of knowledge” (fí ṭalabi'l-'ilm), rendered necessary at first by the circumstances of the case, gradually became a fashion, and finally almost a craze, favoured and justified by such traditions as: “Whosoever goeth forth to seek for learning is in the Way of God until he returns home; the Angels blithely spread their wings over him, and all creatures pray for him, even the fish in the water.”* Makḥúl († A.D. 730), originally a slave in Egypt, would not on receiving his freedom leave that country “till he had gathered together all the learning which was to be found there;” and, having accomplished this, he journeyed through Ḥijáz, 'Iráq, and Syria seeking for an authentic tradition as to the division of spoils taken in battle, which he at last obtained from an old man named Ziyád b. Járiya at-Tamímí, who had it on the authority of Ḥabíb b. Maslama al-Fihrí.* Here we have an actual application of the principle enunciated in the following words ascribed to Abu'd-Dardá: “If the explanation of a passage in the Book of God presented difficulties to me, and if I heard of a man in Birku'l-Jumád” (a most inaccessible spot in South Arabia, proverbially spoken of as equivalent to the ends of the earth) “who would explain it to me, I would not grudge the journey thither.”
*