ABSTRACT
In re-examining briefly the shuubiya conflict in the second and third centuries of the Hijra, the argument of this paper is that it was not merely a conflict between two schools of literature, nor yet a conflict of political nationalisms, but a struggle to determine the destinies of the Islamic culture as a whole. The literary aspects of the shuubiya movement, analysed by Goldziher in the first volume of Muhammedanische Studien, can therefore be taken for granted, in order to concentrate more closely on the significance of the sociological factors which lay behind them.
