Ibn Qutaybah and Arabic Sciences in an Ethnocentric Dialogue

Ibn Qutaybah is pan-Arab anti-Iranian religious intellectual who advocates science and knowledge independently and not in the form of hadith. This can be perceived from his treatise titled Fazl ol-Arab wa al-Tanbih ala Oloomiha which was published with the help of Mongomery Watt and Peter Webb by Al-Maktabat al-Arabia publication in New York in 2017. This treatise has 108 pages in all, and is in two parts. The first part named «Fazl ol –Arab» is about Shu›ubyya and criticizes them. The second part titled «At-Tanbih alā Oloomiha» talks about Arabic sciences including horseback riding, astrology, sagacity, fortunetelling and its ways, sermons, poetry, and Arabic wisdom in the form of prose and poetry. There have been two versions of this treatise introduced in a short Arabic introduction. The first one is Maktaba oz-Zāhirīn version which only included the first part, and was published by Muhammad Kord Ali. The other version, published by Dār ol-Kotob Mesriyya, contains both parts; however, the first pages are missing and the quality of some of the other pages are really low. The correctors have stated that they have compared it with Valīd Mahmood Khāles› publication published in 1998. The present paper is a report of the aforementioned treatise, and reviews Ibn Qutaybah› s views.