Ibn Qutaybah. The Excellence of the Arabs.

AuthorBernards, Monique
PositionBook review

Ibn Qutaybah. The Excellence of the Arabs. Edited by JAMES E. MONTGOMERY and PETER WEBB, translated by SARAH BOWEN SAVANT and PETER WEBB. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. Pp. xxxiii + 297. $40.

Abu Muhammad (c)Abd Allah b. Muslim Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889) was a prolific writer on a variety of topics--poetics, law, gambling, astronomy, literature, and religion. In Western scholarship he is mainly known for his early adab works, such as Adab al-kdtib (The secretary's handbook) and 'Uyun al-akhbar (Choice anecdotes), and less for his earlier, theological works on revealed texts, e.g., Gharib al-hadith (Rare expressions in hadith) or Ta'wil mushkil al-Qur'an (Explanation of problematic passages in the Quran). There is, however, a common theme to all his works: "a concern to anchor Islamic civilization firmly in the Arabic language, and especially in the cultural heritage of the Arabs and of Arabia" (J. Lowry, "Ibn Qutaybah," in Arabic Literary Culture, 500-925, ed. M. Cooperson and S. Toorawa [Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005], 173). The text in hand, Fadl al-'arab wa-l-tanbih 'aid 'ulumihd (The excellence of the Arabs and their sciences), is a prime example of Ibn Qutayba's efforts in this direction since it is "one of the most explicit, sustained, and detailed descriptions of Arab identity written before modern times" (p. xii). It comprises two extended essays: "Book One: Arab Preeminence" and "Book Two: The Excellence of Arabic Learning," in which Ibn Qutayba "addresses one of the central questions confronting his writerly community and its elite patrons" (p. x): What did it mean to be Arab?

In their introduction, the translators situate Ibn Qutayba's writing in a time of political uproar that started with the fraternal civil war between al-Amin and al-Ma'mun, went through the replacement of the Arab military by non-Arab mercenaries and the move of the Abbasid capital from Baghdad to a newly established Samarra--where a fresh elite network of eastern Iranians was formed--and ended with the gradual fragmentation and practical bankruptcy of the Abbasid centralized caliphate. The translators emphasize that, as a state-appointed judge, Ibn Qutayba must have been fully aware of this political turmoil and its consequences for the elite position of the Arabs within Islamic society, since he lived during what is traditionally known as the "period of anarchy" that formally started with the murder of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 247/861).

Ibn Qutayba wrote Fadl al-'arab, the translators add, "probably toward the end of his...

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