Last updated: May 23rd, 2025 at 12:05 pm · Est. Reading Time: 3 minutes
The mutual friction between the Pahlavi-speaking people and the Arabic-speaking people of the 6th century CE is well known.
The Dialogue Between Khosrow and Nu’man
Hatred for each other is illustrated from the opinions the two camps have expressed about each other on entirely different occasions, but are usually put together in a dialogue form that has attained legendary fame.
Khosrow II Parvez, the Sasanian king, is said to have stated, “I see no good in the Arabs – materially and spiritually – they have no force or power in them, their place is with the beasts, they are deprived of the good things life offers, good food, drink and dress. Their food is camel meat, which even the lions refuse to eat because of its bad taste. If they feed a guest, they count it as virtue, and of this they are proud and their poets sing – they are lowly, poor, and miserable, and yet they are so proud and arrogant. They do not complain of hunger, poverty, and misery, and put themselves above all other nations. So of what are they so proud of?” The Lakhmid kinglet Nu’man III supposedly answered, “The earth is their cradle and the sky is their ceiling, their forts are their saddles, they prefer hunger and rags to your luxury and their desert with its hot wind (sumum) to your Persian lands, which they consider a prison. Allah gave them poetry that sings of their integrity (izzat), their courage, and loyalty. Their generosity is such that the poorest among them, with one camel, on which hangs his livelihood, would kill the camel for diner for any stray guest at his door. If a criminal or an outlaw seeks refuge in an Arab tent, he will be protected and defended with their life.1
The Historical Evidence of Schism
Iranian disdain for the Arabs is illustrated by remarks of the commander of the Iranian army, Shirzad, on his entry to the Arab city of Anbar when the Sasanians conquered Iraq. “I saw them writing in Arabic, and when I asked them who they were, they said, ‘clan of Arabs settled amongst Arabs who were there before us, since the days of Nebuchadnezzar, I was among a people who have no brains and their origin is Arab.”2
Similarly, Iranian nobles had contempt towards the Sasanian Shahanshah Bahram V Jur, because he was brought up at the Lakhmid court and had a taste for Arab traditions and way of life, instead of Persian manners. He spoke and wrote Arabic poetry. Nobles hindered his succession, so the Lakhmids sent ten thousand Arab soldiers who set him on the throne.3
Ahoudemmeh, a resident of Mesopotamia in the late sixth century, notes about the Arab nomads, “There were many people between the Tigris and the Euphrates who lived in tents and were barbarians and warlike; numerous were their superstitions, and they were the most ignorant of all the people of the earth.”4
The Root Cause of the Schism
The Lakhmid Arabs were the guardians of the southern border of Sasanian Iran. They were appointed by the Sasanian government but were semi-independent. The relationship was full of friction. Iranians thought of Arabs as a subservient nation, and Arabs saw Iranians as bullies. The Arab-Ajam schism had arisen from the Lakhmid Sasanian political marriage.
Further Reading
Endnotes
- Pseudo-Aṣma’ī, Niyāyat al-irab fī Akhbār al-furs wa-l-‘arab, (London: unpublished British Museum manuscript Ms. Br. Mus.. Add 23298), folio 196 b.
- Abū Jā’far Muḥammad bin Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, The History of al-Ṭabarī, Vol. V, ed. Ehsan Yar-Shater, trans. C. E. Bosworth, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
- Abū Ḥanīfah Aḥmad bin Dāwūd al-Dīnawri, al-Akhbār al-Ṭiwāl, ed. Vladimir Guirgass, (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1888), 53, 56, 57.; Abū Jā’far Muḥammad bin Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, The History of al-Ṭabarī, Vol. V, ed. Ehsan Yar-Shater, trans. C. E. Bosworth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 87.
- Francois Nau, “Histoires D’Ahoudemmeh et de Marouta, Metropolitains Jacobites de Targit et de L’orient (Vie et VIIE siecles), Suivies du traite D’ahoudemmeh sur l’homme,” in Patrologia Orientalis Volume III, eds. Renè Graffin and Francois Nau, (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1909), 21, 52 – 96.