The Shu'ûbîyah Controversy and the Social History of Early Islamic Iran

TLDR: In a state of rude nature, wrote Edmund Burke, "There is no such thing as a people" as mentioned in this paper, and "the idea of a people is a legal fiction made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement".

Abstract: “In a state of rude nature”, wrote Edmund Burke, “there is no such thing as a people… The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial; and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular nature of that agreement was, is collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast”. Whether the Iranians in the early Islamic period — that is, the period from the seventh to the twelfth century — were in Burke's sense a “people” is a question that the cautious scholar would be eager to disregard and loath to handle. After all, those specialists on early Islamic Iran who have, directly or indirectly, expressed opinions on this subject have all too often projected events from the life of their own nation and times back to these earlier centuries. In no case is this projection more obvious than in the many essays written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which see this question only as a question of “national liberation”: did the Iranians hate the Arabs, and did they hope to regain their empire by destroying, or profoundly reshaping, the empire of the Muslim caliphs?