Descripción

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Dr. Albrecht Noth (1937-1999), langj�igem Professor f�r Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients in Bonn und Hamburg. Einband leicht berieben. Papierbedingt leicht gebr�t. - Approximately a century after the sudden appearance of Islam as a political force in the Middle East, the administration of the provinces annexed by the Arabs was largely in the hands of neo-Muslims of non-Arab extraction. The Arabs imparted their new religion, their language, and their poetry to the recently conquered terri-tories, but they lacked both the tradition and the experience needed to organize a large empire. They were therefore forced to depend upon the cooperation of their subjects, whose professional classes they consequently permitted to hold positions of influence within the administrative structure of the empire. These neo-Muslims or mawali (sing, maula, freedman) were at times treated as second-class citizens by an Arab aristocracy entirely absorbed with its concern for tribal honor as embodied in the glorious traditions of pagan days preserved by Arabic poetry. The proud and disdainful behavior of the Arabs toward the mawali did not take long in provoking a reaction known as the movement of the Shu'ubiyya which in the third Islamic century vociferously proclaimed the superiority of the Persians and other non-Arab peoples vis-a-vis the Arabs.