12 Facts About Ibn al-Muqaffa'

Ibn al-Muqaffa' al-Muqaffa, though a resident of Basra, was originally from the town of Goor in the Iranian province of Fars and was born into a family of Persian stock.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' was a native speaker of Middle Persian and a non-native speaker of Arabic; Ibn al-Muqaffa composed his Arabic works during a period when the rules of Classical Arabic were still taking shape and the Arabic linguistic tradition was just emerging.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' later returned to Basra and served as a secretary under Isa ibn Ali and Sulayman ibn Ali, the uncles of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' was reportedly executed in Basra in 757 AD for heresy by al-Mansur.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' paved the way for later innovators such as al-Hamadani and al-Saraqusti, who brought literary fiction to Arabic literature by adapting traditionally accepted modes of oral narrative transmission into literary prose.

Khwaday-Namag: Ibn al-Muqaffa' is thought to have produced an Arabic adaptation of the late Sasanian Khwaday-Namag, a chronicle of pre-Islamic Persian kings, princes, and warriors.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' is known to have modified certain parts of the original and excluded others, possibly to make it intelligible to his Arab Muslim readers.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' is thought to have inserted an account of Mazdak, from which later Perso-Arab historians derived much of their knowledge of the Mazdakite movement.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' is to give strict priority to the mastery of fundamentals, examples of which are given along with illustrations of the ways in which they can be applied.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' remains pragmatic: A friendship should be formed, not with an inferior, but with a superior, for to make friends of inferiors bespeaks envy, which is reprehensible.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' calls for vigilance and good intelligence in Iraq to counter discontent in Basra and Kufa and pleads for deserving Iraqis to be afforded scope for the exercise of their talents in government service.

Ibn al-Muqaffa' recommends cautious clemency for the conquered Syrians, the recruitment from among them of a hand-picked caliphal elite, the lifting of ruinous economic sanctions, and fair distribution of foodstuffs in the Syrian military districts.