The Arabs needed reinforcing their own natural way of speech...

The Arabs needed reinforcing their own natural way of speech with a discipline of conscious effort; they were also eager, in keeping with the true spirit of Islam, to pass on to the myriads of non-Arabs, who daily swelled the ranks of the faithful, not only the religion and the practices of Islam but also the language as a key to a first-hand knowledge of its primary source or sources.[^2] Actually, however, only a few of the Arabs concerned themselves with those branches of studies which involved the use of the method of qiyas , i.e.

analogy and deduction.[^3] Such creative intellectual activity was notably flair of the non-Arab inhabitants of Iraq, which province occupied a unique position in the incipient literary life of Islam.

It is worthwhile recalling that the province had been the cradle of ancient civilizations and the nursery of cultural currents from the Hellenes, including those relayed from the important academy of Jundi-Shapur; hence, the mental attitudes of its inhabitants bore the stamp of philosophical scientific discipline.

Still more remarkable was the spirit motivating the political relationship of these “intellectuals” with their proud and unlettered masters, the Arabs, and their peculiar religious and cultural propensities towards Islam and the Arabic language. In contrast with Syria and Egypt, it will be seen that the ‘Ajmis of Iraq were from the very beginning determined to assert their own individuality, albeit only within the pale of Islam and on the ground of Arabs’ own devotion to the Arabic language.

Even the Sh‘ubiyyah movement, the outburst of an outraged sense of superiority of the Persians over the Arabs, involved no resilience from loyalty to the language of the Qur’an. It was a clear parallel to early Shi‘ism, which was calculated to work out the political ascendancy of the Persians but only under the supreme and authoritarian over-lordship of the House of the Arabian Prophet.

Basrah and Kufa, the two cantonments of the Arabs, provided ideal conditions for fruitful contact between the Arabs and the non-Arabs.