THE ROLE OF PERSIAN BUREAUCRATS IN THE SHUUBIYYA MOVEMENT: EARLY ABBASID PERIOD

The racist policies and practices of many Umayyad caliphs caused serious crises which would undermine the Islamic social structure. The non-Arab (the Mawali) peoples of the empire, who were victims of the difficult circumstances in this period, had been exposed to unfair and discriminatory laws on the basis of race due to these caliphs’ chauvinist attitudes. The transition of the caliphate from the Umayyads to the Abbasids would enable the Mawali elements to react against the Arabism. In the middle of the eighth century, the Islamic world witnessed the genesis of a literary and scholarly movement which would be called as the Shuubiyya. The representatives of the movement (the Shuubis), the majority of whom were Persians, reacted to Arab racism with their works and studies in various fields such as literature, history and translation. One of the two tasks of the current paper is to determine the impact of Persian statesmen and high-ranking officials on the development of the Shuubiyya movement. The other is to scrutinize and compare modern researchers’ different arguments about the ultimate target of the Shuubis. In the light of present knowledge and findings, the conclusion which this study reaches is that the Shuubiyya, whose Persian supporters played an active role in the spread of its doctrine, was an apolitical movement.