Basra, the cradle of Islamic culture. A reasoned analysis of the urban area that was the early home of Islamic Studies.

Several factors account for the primacy of Baúra in Islamic studies, some attributable to objective reasons, some to prevailing anthropological, historical and political conditions. Baúra is the only VII-century town that can be considered really free from external constraints, an urban area that had always tried to make its decisions alone. For this reason, it had been defeated often by Umayyad or ‘Abbâsid armies, as during the Zubairid phase (683- 691/64-72) or throughout al-Nafs al-Zakiyya uprising in 762/145. Baúra’s defeat as a political factor in the first century, however, allowed it to gain instead a significant role in the rise of early Islamic studies, greater even than that of the capital, Damascus. The Arab Bedouin urbanization process and the simultaneous phase of Islamization brought the appeasement of the Arab pre-Islamic feeling of freedom and independence along with the first Muslim elaboration of religious studies. Baúra’s primacy in Islamic studies underlined the lack of distinction concerning the orthodoxy and the un-orthodoxy of the singular religious contribution and without censorship because novelty and freshness do not directly imply undesirable innovation (bid‘a). This situation fostered, on the one hand, the emergence of a significant process of elaboration within cultural and religious-Islamic studies, which initially was not able to distinguish the mystics from Tradition, or Quranic studies from theology, and, subsequently, the attempt to elaborate an Islamic ethical society which rejected the division of the Umma (the Islamic community after the fitna al-Kubrâ) and, as such, could promote a process of social moralization completely detached from political intrigue. This quietist approach is exemplified by Baúra’s pre-Sufism movements, early theological schools, the presence of violent and non-violent Æarióites sects and the lack of aüâdíth makers against religious adversaries. Finally, Baúra is the urban area in which free will had been reconciled within God’s transcendence without having considered disrespectful of ‘Allâh’s power, but in full compliance with his justice.