É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.

SZOMBATHY, Zoltán: Some Notes on the Impact of the Shu übiyya on Arabic Genealogy

ZOLTÁN SZOMBATI IY to state that the poet's hostility, or rather sarcasm, was not directed against the Arabs as a people, especially as he also composed poems in praise of the Yemenite tribes, to one of which he was bound by clientage

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7, while it is also obvious that he utterly declined to display the customary deferential regard towards every aspect of the desert nomads' lifestyle."

8 That such views were common in shüübi circles seems probable from a polemic passage in the Mufäkharat al-jawäri wa-l-ghilmän of alJähiz, in which we read the following comments on pre-Islamic poetry: "But you have drawn your arguments from boorish and uncouth Bedouins who were nourished and brought up by wretchedness and hardship; who were altogether ignorant of luxurious life and worldly pleasures, living as they did in the desert and shunning [other] people like wild beasts do; who would eat porcupines and lizards and crack [the kernels] of the colocynth. Their utmost accomplishment was lamenting over traces of camping-grounds, or describing a woman by comparing her to wild cows or antelopes, although women are more beautiful than those. Why, they would even compare a woman to a snake, or call her "misshapen" or "scabby", in order to avert the evil eye, according to their way of reasoning!"

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9 Every student of mediaeval Arabic literature will be familiar with the deeprooted, all but unshakeable belief among Muslim scholars in the moral superiority of Arab Bedouins over sedentary peoples, their inborn "purity", "integrity" and "nobility", to which was added an imagery of simplicity, roughness and uncorrupted fierceness, an image surprisingly akin to the "noble savage" of much later European controversy had long ceased to be a living issue by that time. See Ibn Khaldün, Muqaddima II, 513-5, 548, 602. 2' Abü Nuwäs, Diwan 86-89, 387-88; also cf. al-Mas

cüdi, Tanbih 87. In the Book of Misers of al-Jähiz, Abü Nuwäs is quoted as the narrator of a wry story on the deplorable parsimony of the Persian inhabitants of Khuräsän province. See al-Jähiz, Bukhalä

' 24. ~

8 Albert Arazi, in his fundamental article on the question of Abü Nuwäs's alleged shiiübi leanings, describes this attitude as 'un su

cübisme de civilisation', and shows that urban civilization was considered to be the domain of ancient South Arabia no less than of Persia. He finally concludes that, contrary to the traditionally accepted view, Abü Nuwäs simply cannot be regarded as a shu

cübi in any meaningful sense, his attitude being dominated by a marked "sud-arabisme" instead of a pro-Persian tendency. See Arazi (1979): 5, 35, 61. While I find Arazi's arguments more or less convincing, the point that I want to make is different. Instead of examining whether Abü Nuwäs, or another particular intellectual, did actually entertain antiarab sentiments, I would like to show that the very term shu'übi might in fact be a liberally distributed, very vague pejorative label, often given to people who did not dislike or oppose the Arabs at all. And it is only in that sense (and bearing in mind the hollowness of the term) that Abü Nuwäs was indeed a shiiübi: after all, he was labelled such. On the similarly vague and varied applications of the pejorative sticker zindiq

, see Vajda (1938). 2

9 al-Jähiz, Rasä'/1

1 (2), 105. 264