Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808 AH/1406 CE) said in al-Muqaddimah:
It is a remarkable fact that most of those who carried knowledge within the Islamic community were non-Arabs, whether in the religious sciences or the rational sciences, apart from a few rare exceptions. Even when one of them was Arab by lineage, he was non-Arab in his language, upbringing and the teachers under whom he studied. This was despite the fact that the religion itself was Arabic and the one who brought its Sharīʿah was an Arab.
The reason for this is that, in its earliest period, the Muslim community possessed neither sciences nor crafts, owing to the simplicity and Bedouin way of life that characterised its circumstances. The rulings of the Sharīʿah, which are Allah’s commands and prohibitions, were carried by men in their hearts. They knew the sources from which these rulings were derived, namely the Book and the Sunnah, through what they had received from the one who brought the Sharīʿah and from his Companions.
At that time, the people were Arabs who were unfamiliar with formal instruction, authorship and the systematic recording of knowledge. They had neither been driven towards such activities nor had any need arisen that called for them.
This state of affairs continued throughout the time of the Companions and the Tābiʿīn. Those who specialised in carrying and transmitting this knowledge were called the Qurrāʾ (Readers), meaning those who could read the Book and were not illiterate. This was because illiteracy was at that time a general characteristic of the Companions, since they were Arabs. Those who carried the Qurʾān were therefore called Qurrāʾ at that time, as an indication of this.
They were readers of the Book of Allah and of the Sunnah transmitted from Allah, for they knew the religious rulings only through the Qurʾān and through the ḥadīth, which, in most instances, serves to explain and clarify it. The Prophet said:
تَرَكْتُ فِيكُمْ أَمْرَيْنِ لَنْ تَضِلُّوا مَا تَمَسَّكْتُمْ بِهِمَا: كِتَابَ اللَّهِ وَسُنَّتِي
“I have left among you two matters. You will never go astray so long as you hold firmly to them: the Book of Allah and my Sunnah.” (Mālik, al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, Kitāb al-Qadar)
When transmission had become distant from its source, from the reign of ar-Rashīd onwards, it became necessary to compile commentaries on the Qurʾān and to record the ḥadīth in writing, out of fear that they might be lost. It then became necessary to know the chains of transmission (asānīd) and to assess the reliability of the transmitters, so as to distinguish authentic chains from those of lesser standing.
Thereafter, the derivation of rulings for actual cases from the Book and the Sunnah increased greatly. At the same time, the Arabic language became corrupted, making it necessary to lay down the rules of grammar.
All the religious sciences thus became acquired faculties (malakāt) in deduction, derivation, comparison and analogical reasoning. They came to need other sciences that served as instruments for them: knowledge of the rules of the Arabic language, the rules governing deduction and analogical reasoning, and the defence of the articles of faith with proofs, owing to the proliferation of innovations and heresy. All these sciences thus became disciplines resting on acquired faculties and requiring instruction, and so they came to be counted among the crafts.
We have already explained that the crafts are the pursuit of settled urban people, and that the Arabs are the furthest of all people from them. For this reason, the sciences became urban, and the Arabs remained distant from them and from the market in which they flourished.
The urban people of that era were the non-Arabs, or those who shared their condition, such as the mawālī (non-Arab clients) and the inhabitants of the cities who at that time followed the non-Arabs in civilisation and its associated crafts and professions. They were the best equipped for such pursuits, owing to the deeply rooted urban civilisation that had existed among them since the time of the Persian Empire.
Thus, the master of the craft of grammar was Sībawayh, followed by al-Fārisī and then az-Zajjāj. All of them were non-Arabs by ancestry. They had, however, been raised in the Arabic language and acquired it through their upbringing and association with the Arabs. They then made it into rules and a discipline for those who came after them.
Likewise, most of those who carried the ḥadīth and preserved it on behalf of the people of Islam were non-Arabs, or people who had become non-Arab in language and upbringing, owing to the extensive development of the discipline in Iraq. The scholars of Uṣūl al-Fiqh were all non-Arabs, as is well known, and likewise those who carried ʿIlm al-Kalām, as well as most of the Qurʾānic exegetes.
None but the non-Arabs undertook the preservation and recording of knowledge. In this, the truth of the Prophet’s statement became manifest:
لَوْ تَعَلَّقَ الْعِلْمُ بِأَكْنَافِ السَّمَاءِ لَنَالَهُ قَوْمٌ مِنْ أَهْلِ فَارِسَ
“If knowledge were suspended from the farthest reaches of the heavens, a people from Persia would attain it.”
As for the Arabs who came into contact with this urban civilisation and its market, and left their Bedouin way of life for it, leadership in the ʿAbbāsid state, and the responsibilities of rule into which they had been drawn, kept them from pursuing knowledge and studying it. For they were the people of the state, its protectors and those who directed its policy. In addition, they felt a disdain at that time for taking up knowledge as a profession, since it had become one of the crafts, and those in authority always disdain crafts, professions and whatever leads to them. So they handed it over to those who took it up from among the non-Arabs and those of mixed descent (muwalladūn).
Even so, they continued to regard such people as entitled to undertake it, for it was their religion and their sciences, and they did not hold its bearers in complete contempt. But when authority passed entirely from the Arabs to the non-Arabs, the religious sciences became foreign to those who held power, since they themselves were remote from any connection with them. Their bearers were then held in low regard, because those in power saw them as remote from themselves and occupied with what availed them nothing in matters of rule and politics, as we mentioned in the section on the religious ranks.
What we have established here is the reason why the bearers of the Sharīʿah, or most of them, were non-Arabs.
As for the rational sciences, they too appeared in the Muslim community only after the bearers and authors of knowledge had become a distinct class and all knowledge had settled into a craft. They were then taken up exclusively by the non-Arabs, while the Arabs left them and turned away from pursuing them. They were therefore carried only by Arabicised non-Arabs, as is the case with the crafts, as we said at the beginning.
This continued in the cities of Islam so long as urban civilisation remained among the non-Arabs and in their lands of Iraq, Khurāsān and Transoxania. When those cities fell into ruin and urban civilisation, which is Allah’s secret in the attainment of knowledge and the crafts, departed from them, knowledge departed entirely from the non-Arabs, because the Bedouin way of life had overtaken them. Knowledge then became confined to the cities rich in urban civilisation, and today none is richer in it than Egypt. It is the mother of the world, the great hall (īwān) of Islam, and the wellspring of knowledge and the crafts.
Some urban civilisation has also remained in Transoxania, owing to the dynasty there, so its people have a share of the sciences and the crafts that cannot be denied. This was shown to us by the words of one of their scholars, in works that have reached us in this land: Saʿd ad-Dīn at-Taftāzānī. As for the rest of the non-Arabs, we have not seen from them, since the Imām Ibn al-Khaṭīb and Naṣīr ad-Dīn aṭ-Ṭūsī, any writing whose excellence can be relied upon.
So consider this and reflect upon it, and you will see a wonder among the conditions of creation. Allah creates whatever He wills; He has no partner; to Him belong the dominion and all praise, and He has power over all things. Allah is sufficient for us, and He is the best Disposer of affairs, and all praise belongs to Allah.
References
Ibn Khaldūn, ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad (d. 808 AH/1406 CE). Al-Muqaddimah, Book One, Chapter Six, section 43: Fī anna ḥamalat al-ʿilm fī al-Islam aktharuhum al-ʿajam. In Tārīkh Ibn Khaldūn, vol. 1, pp. 747–749.
Al-Bukhārī, Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl (d. 256 AH/870 CE). Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. No. 4897.
Mālik ibn Anas (d. 179 AH/795 CE). Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ. Kitāb al-Qadar.
Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj al-Qushayrī an-Naysābūrī (d. 261 AH/875 CE). Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim. Edited by Muḥammad Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī. No. 2546.
