As QUOTED by Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi, a Shū'ubī response to an anti- Shū'ubī treatise by Ibn Qutayba noted that the latter actually advocated equality for all human beings born out of dust and for replacing pride in their genealogies ( ansāb) by the ideals of mindfulness ( taqwā) and obedience to God (tā'at al-lāh ).Between these scholastically acculturated ideals and the basic realities of contempt, mistrust and downright enmity in daily life, there existed ambivalence, a complex of acceptance and rejection that comprised the dominant feature of Muslim literature on inter-ethnic and inter-racial relations. As Goldziher rightly noted: “The Muslim teaching of the equality of all men in Islam remained a dead letter for a long time, never realised in the conciousness of Arabs and roundly denied in their day-to-day behaviour.”Ultimately, such ambivalence probably reflects the balance between interdependence and particularism in the Arab attitude towards neighbouring ethnic groups. In what follows some aspects of these ambivalences will be reviewed.

Goldziher's observation on the traditional notion relating the Persians to the Arabs by saying that the former descended from Isaac can also be applied to similar attempts at accommodation with respect to other peoples. Such attempts may be viewed as Islam's traditional way of sketching interdependence between the different ethnicities of that faith along the lines of family relations; a clear parallel to this can be traced in the Old Testament concerning the relations between the Israelites and neighbouring peoples.

The idea that the Persians are sons of Isaac was advanced by a variety of traditions attributed to the Prophet. Their main aim was to enhance the role of Persians in the establishment of Islam, and at least some of them bear a clear colouring from the ‘Abbāsid period. Thus, while two of them, associated with the names of Ibn ‘Umar and Abu Hurayra, simply state this notion, a third one, bearing the name of Ibn ‘Abbās, adds that being sons of Isaac and cousins to the sons of Ishmael, “the Persians are a band [related] to us, the people of the house [of the Prophet]” (fāris ‘u§batunā ahl al-bayt). 4 The isnād of this last tradition is Sufyan al-Thawrl (d. 161/777) +← Mu’āwiya ibn Qurra (Ba∼ran, d. 113/731) +← Sa'īd ibn Jubayr +←Ibn ‘Abbās+← the Prophet.