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C h a p t e r  “The Sharīf of Every People Is Well-Born”: Genealogy and the Legitimization of Minority Culture Adding his own voice to the frequently venomous literary debate over the respective place of Arab and non-Arab peoples in medieval Islamic society— the so-called shuʿūbiyya controversy—Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), the great ninth-century Arabic belletrist and polymath, himself of non-Arab, Persian extraction, writes in his Kitāb al-ʿarab (The Book of the Arabs): “Now the noblemen of the non-Arabs [ʿajam], their men of importance and their men of religion understand what is to their advantage and disadvantage and consider a proven genealogy to be a sign of nobility.”1 As Roy Mottahedeh explains , in so arguing Ibn Qutayba sought a way around the shuʿūbiyya divide, advocating the assimilation of the Arab and Persian upper classes, both of whom, he believed, had a mutual enemy in “the common people for whom no nasab is known.” Summarizing this position, Mottahedeh writes: “[Ibn Qutayba] who, in this same treatise affirms his own Persian origin, in effect believes that the new Arab ruling class and the older Iranian ruling class can have shared genealogical prejudice against their ‘rootless’ subordinates.”2 Ibn Qutayba’s observation, focusing as it does on the genealogical dimension of the debate concerning the place non-Arabs and non-Arab culture would occupy in Islamic society, has significant implications for our understanding of what I have characterized broadly as Near Eastern Jewry’s embrace of nasab. Not only do Ibn Qutayba’s comments remind us of the role that nasab played in the determination of status in that cultural environment, they suggest that through genealogical records of a proven, that is, Arab, sort, non-Arabs could hope to win recognition from the Arab population and its cultural elites. Genealogy, in other words, could bridge the gap between Arab 164 Chapter  and non-Arab and serve as a tool for the attainment of cultural legitimization . This view is powerfully expressed in Ibn Qutayba’s conviction that “nobility is a single tie, for the nobleman [sharīf ] of every people is well-born.”3 That Ibn Qutayba should have singled out genealogical fastidiousness as a possible means of reconciliation between shu‘ūbīs and their opponents is significant inasmuch as genealogy was of course one of the central issues over which the two parties fought, a focus that in and of itself speaks to the profound importance ascribed to lineage in Arab-Islamic society. Indeed, a critical theme in the often-heated literature of the shuʿūbiyya controversy focuses on the respective merits and shortcomings in the genealogies of the two sides. Though mainly a literary debate among cultural elites, the polemical attacks that were exchanged between shuʿūbīs and their rivals, which reached a peak during the Abbasid period, grew out of deep and simmering tensions that extended as far back as the seventh century, tensions that surrounded the unresolved status in the formative Islamic society of Muslims of non-Arab extraction. Such concerns came to the fore in the aftermath of the Islamic expansion. With its rapid conquest of the Near East and the annexation of lands populated by peoples of various races and ethnicities, the fledgling Arab polity confronted a new social reality vastly more complex and diverse than the one from which it had emerged. Over time a significant percentage of the native inhabitants of these territories accepted the new faith and succeeded in entering the still largely tribal society of their conquerors by attaching themselves as clients (mawālī; sing. mawla) to Arab patrons.4 Many not only embraced Islam, but came to identify with and make important contributions to Arabic literary culture as well. In principle, the mawālī were entitled to the same privileges as Arab Muslims; in practice, though, they were often treated as second-class citizens.5 But even with such discrimination they rapidly rose to prominent administrative, military, and scholarly positions in Muslim society during the period of Umayyad rule, a development that actually may have sharpened the resentments on both sides.6 And so despite—but perhaps also because of—the growing influence of the mawālī within Islamic society, bias against them festered among certain sectors of the Arab aristocracy. Concerns over such prejudice are revealed in traditions ascribed to Muḥammad that go out of their way to emphasize the equality of Arab and non-Arab. According...

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