While the concept of shuʿubiyya originally referred to the cultural and political rivalry between Arabs and Persians in the ʿAbbasid era, the term reappeared as a critical paradigm of racial, sectarian, and ideological conflict in modern Iraqi cultural politics. This modern discourse of shuʿubiyya effectively blurred the lines between the racial historical rivalries of Arabs and Persian and the ostensibly “modern” rivalries of sectarianism and nationalism. This paper analyzes the difference between classical and modern modes of shuʿubiyya to ask how and why an idea so strongly rooted in classical history emerged as a critical marker of competing visions of modernity. I argue that the modern shuʿubiyya inscribed quintessentially “modern” values into the historical literary and cultural debate. Moving beyond the chauvinist arguments about the respective merits of different racial and ethnic groups, modern shuʿubiyya invective instead made secular visions of patriotism into core paradigms of communal and ideological conflict. The twentieth-century shuʿubiyya revival has been previously analyzed in both Arabic (ʿAbd al-Hadi al-Fukayki) and English (Sami Hanna and George Gardner), but this paper will change the scholarly debate in three important ways. First, at the theoretical level, by adopting Ussama Makdisi’s critical interrogation of the secular/Islamic dichotomy in his vision of the “modern ecumenical frame” in the Arab world, I show that the shuʿubiyya debates aimed to challenge rather than reinforce primordial racial and sectarian conflicts. Second, at the methodological level, by moving beyond the domain of political rhetoric and sloganeering and toward the domain of poetry, literature, and art, I show that the shuʿubiyya debates were not simply empty tactical maneuvers of partisan politics but instead represented deeply personal efforts to interrogate individual and community relations to modernity and progress. Third, at the historical level, by thinking through the global and comparative implications of the modern shuʿubiyya debates in the context of the Cultural Cold War, I show how the conflict between communism and anticommunism made shuʿubiyya a critical fulcrum in the modern evolution from racial/national to religious/sectarian conflict. The paper draws from a range of historical sources, including literature and art, newspapers and magazines, and archives and memoirs about the shuʿubiyya debates between the late 1920s and early 1960s. Ultimately, my analysis of these sources allows me to show how ideas of lineage and culture so central to the original shuʿubiyya debates were occluded, distorted, or transformed in the ecumenical frame of Arab modernity.