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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Excellence of the Arabs

The Excellence of the Arabs

Savant, Sarah Bowen
Qutaybah, Ibn
Webb, Peter

Paperback

Series: Library of Arabic Literature, Book 51

Fiction AnthologiesGeneral Middle Eastern HistoryGeneral World History

Publisher Price: $20.00

ISBN10: 1479899267
ISBN13: 9781479899265
Publisher: New York Univ Pr
Published: Sep 4 2019
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.60 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

A spirited defense of Arab identity from a time of political unrest

In ninth-century Abbasid Baghdad, the social prestige attached to claims of Arab identity had begun to decline. In The Excellence of the Arabs, the celebrated litterateur Ibn Qutaybah locks horns with those members of his society who belittled Arabness and vaunted the glories of Persian heritage and culture. Instead, he upholds the status of Arabs and their heritage in the face of criticism and uncertainty.

The Excellence of the Arabs is in two parts. In the first, Arab Preeminence, which takes the form of an extended argument for Arab privilege, Ibn Qutaybah accuses his opponents of blasphemous envy. In the second, The Excellence of Arab Learning, he describes the fields of knowledge in which he believed pre-Islamic Arabians excelled, including knowledge of the stars, divination, horse husbandry, and poetry. By incorporating extensive excerpts from the poetic heritage--the archive of the Arabs--Ibn Qutaybah aims to demonstrate that poetry is itself sufficient evidence of Arab superiority.

Eloquent and forceful, The Excellence of the Arabs addresses a central question at a time of great social flux, at the dawn of classical Muslim civilization: What does it mean to be Arab?

An English-only edition.

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