Likewise, among every other non-Arab people—Abyssinians, Byzantines, Turks, and the rest—there are forerunners in faith and religion whose numbers are beyond reckoning, as the scholars well know. Genuine merit resides in following what God sent with Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, of faith and knowledge, inwardly and outwardly; and whoever embodies that most fully is the most excellent.

Excellence, therefore, is tied only to the praiseworthy qualities named in the Qur’an and Sunnah—Islam, faith, righteousness, God-fearingness, knowledge, righteous deeds, ihsān, and the like. It is not conferred merely by being Arab or non-Arab, black or white, nor by living in a settled town or in the desert.

The prohibition against resembling either the desert Arabs or the foreign nations, despite the virtue found among them and the fact that lineage and location carry no weight in themselves, rests on a basic principle: God, exalted is He, has arranged matters such that residence in the towns fosters in a person a completeness in knowledge and religion and a softness of heart that life in the desert does not ordinarily produce, just as the desert engenders bodily toughness, strength of character, and robustness of speech seldom found in the towns. That is the underlying rule, though it can fail to apply when an impediment arises, and on occasion the desert may be more beneficial than the towns.

Similarly, God made His messengers people of the settled towns. He says, “We did not send before you except men to whom We revealed, from among the people of the towns” (Yūsuf 12:109). This is because the messengers possess perfection in all respects, even in lineage. Hence God, exalted is He, said, “The Bedouin are more intense in unbelief and hypocrisy and more likely not to know the limits of what God has sent down upon His Messenger” (al-Tawbah 9:97). He mentioned this after