On Persian Scholars
Ibn Khaldun, 14th-century Arab writer, philosopher, and historian par excellence, is most famous for his monumental Muqaddimah (in English, “introduction”), a brilliant work which has been described as, among other things, the first sociological text in history. The scope of the Muqaddimah is incredibly broad, addressing civilizational rise and collapse, demographic shifts, poetics, theology, etc.
One of my favorite sections of the Muqadimmah is a brief section which addresses the fact that most scholars of Islam have not been Arabs, despite Islam’s Arab origin and founder. In fact, the majority of famous Islamic men-of-letters were Persians. Ibn Khaldun interprets this phenomenon within his framework of the transition from nomadic life to sedentary life. The Bedouin had no need of religious sciences; their knowledge of Arabic and the sunnah was perfect because it was part of their culture, not something to be learned formally. The “craft” of religious sciences (theology, grammar, among others) only developed when the caliphate moved away from its nomadic origins and settled into cities.
Persians living in these cities, when they became Muslims, had none of the inborn awareness of Arabic and Islam which Ibn Khaldun believed the Bedouins to possess. They were, however, the heirs of a long intellectual tradition as Persian civilization had existed in urban centers for thousands of years. This intellectual “craft” mixed with Arab Islamic culture to create the formalized, literate religious sciences. According to Ibn Khaldun, Arab rulers disdained scholarship and thus the only people who practiced it were non-Arabs, almost always Persians in this instance.
I’ve always found it odd that Ibn Khaldun, a deeply-educated, systematizing writer and thinker, had such resentment towards sedentary culture and makes such a point of extolling the virtues of Bedouin culture. And it’s interesting that, as an Arabophone Tunisian, he is so interested and so well-versed in scholarship thousands of miles and often hundreds of years removed from him. Lastly, what do we make of this commentary at all? Was this topic often a subject of conversation? Is it a personal question? What caused him in the first place to wonder about the place of Persian scholars as Persians in the broader context of Islam and its great minds?