VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 199also a little bit forward, and to consolidate in this way our sense of the First
Millennium’s distinctiveness. I pick out certain themes broached earlier in
the book, and elaborate them from the 1000 CE viewpoint. I have chosen
four cities associated with momentous activity, not all of it conceptual, but in
each case connected to far wider regions, whether spatial or mental. First
comes another look at the Iranian perspective.
tūs/Iran
I have already touched on Iran’s geographic, imperial, and strategic role, its
cultural complexity, and the Iranian Commonwealth. Formal independence
was lost with the Sasanids’ collapse before Arab onslaught. yet neither Iran’s
political subjection nor its people’s gradual acceptance of Islam, which be-
came the majority religion only during the tenth century, could extinguish
its language or historical and cultural memory. These were the foundations
of the “Iranian identity” that revived between the ninth and eleventh centu-
ries and was resurgent by the thirteenth.^2 To Arabic scholarship and letters
the Iranian contribution was so definitive that educated Iranians questioned
whether there had been an Arab contribution at all—the so- called Shuʿūbīya
movement in the eighth and especially ninth centuries.^3 The Shuʿūbīya had
no problem with the Caliphate as a political structure. Rather they wanted to
take advantage of it to assert the universal centrality of the Iranian tradi-
tion—not to mention the privileges of a particular scholarly elite.
To tenth/eleventh- century Islamic exegetical culture Tabarī made a clas-
sic contribution in the field of Qurʾanic commentary, while Ibn Sīnā mas-
tered and passed beyond it in that of philosophy. Ibn Sīnā’s slightly older
contemporary and correspondent Bīrūnī (d. 1048), also for a time a client of
the Bukhārā Samanids, surpassed both in the breadth and catholicity of his
skeptical erudition in the fields of history and chronolog y (his major contri-
bution to this subject appeared about the year 1000), mathematics, astron-
omy, geography, pharmacolog y, mineralog y, history of religions, and Indol-
og y (showing here a sympathy and thoroughness unrivalled before modern
times).^4 All three were Muslims and wrote in Arabic; but Tabarī’s insistence
that only Iran of all the nations had enjoyed a history “uninterrupted, con-
stant and regular,”^5 Ibn Sīnā’s “Eastern” philosophy and his trail- blazing com-
position of a popularizing philosophical treatise in Persian,^6 and Bīrūnī’s
2 A. Ashraf, “Iranian identity i, iii,” EIr 13.501–4, 507–22.
3 H. T. Norris, “Shuʿūbiyyah in Arabic literature,” in J. Ashtiany and others (eds), ʿAbbasid belles-
lettres (Cambridge 1990) 31–47; S. Enderwitz, “Shuʿūbīya,” EIs^2 9.513–16.
4 C. E. Bosworth and others, “Bīrūnī, Abū Rayhān,” EIr 4.274–87.
5 Al- Tabarī, History [3:85] 1.148, 353 (tr. Khalidi, Arabic historical thought [3:82] 78).
6 M. Achena, “Avicenna xi,” EIr 3.99–104.