Adab

The Arabic word adab has a wide variety of meanings and also has had different connotations at different times. Broadly speaking, the term refers to literature, but included in the concept "literature" is the person and character of the adib--one who is a skilled litterateur. The Muslim adib is the precursor of the Humanist as he emerged during the European Renaissance--but with a twist: for the Islamic tradition presumes that traffic in great literature refines not only the sensibilities of the Humanist, but his manners and his moral comportment as well.

According to Gabrieli, in the 9th century CE, an adib was someone who was "not only cultivated in Arabic poetry and prose, in maxims and proverbs, in the genealogy and tradition of the djahiliyya and of the Arabs at a time when they were hardly yet Islamized, but broadened his range of interests to include the Iranian world with all its epic, gnomic, and narrative tradition, the Indian world with its fables, and the Greek world with its practical philosophy" [EI(2), v. 1: 176].

There really was a time when the word "civilization" meant something.