Well over a century ago, Ignaz Goldziher in his Muhammadanische Studien depicted the Shu‘ubiyya as a movement among Iranian intellectuals of the 2nd-3rd centuries AH, who denigrated the culture of the Arabs in their writings, hoping to revive the civilization of pre-Islamic Iran. Students of early Islamic Iraq and Iran have mostly accepted this definition, no doubt due to the fact this is the picture of the Shu‘ubiyya which our primary sources, most notably ‘Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz’s Kitab al-Bayan wa’l tabyin, and Muslim b. Qutayba’s Kitab al-‘Arab appear to present. At the same time however, a critical analysis of these scholars’ portrayal of the Shu‘ubiyya leaves some pressing questions that challenge this paradigm. For example, who exactly were the Shu‘ubis? For when the sources mention their polemic, they almost always paraphrase their arguments, rarely providing names. Moreover, when one studies the works and biographies of individuals generally assumed to be Shu‘ubis, there is scant evidence that any of them saw themselves as participating in such a movement, nor that they even held the views that their critics ascribed to them. Equally important is the question of why it is only in the works of the Shu‘ubiyya’s critics, the so-called “anti-Shu‘ubis,” that this movement is described. This paper aims to define the Shu‘ubiyya afresh by deconstructing commonly held notions of what this phenomenon was actually about. I argue that the Shu‘ubiyya was in fact, not representative of an Iranian revival movement, but on the contrary, it was the product of the collective imagination of intellectuals of the early ‘Abbasid period engaged in the construction of an Arab-Islamic identity and high culture. To this end, I contend that the nostalgic interest of the Arabs’ heritage and the proliferation of scholarship on the ‘ilm al-‘arab (Arab sciences) which manifested itself at the court of the early ‘Abbasid caliphs did not arise in response to the Shu‘ubiyya as some scholars have argued. Rather, the Shu‘ubiyya itself was constructed as a foil, an “Other” unto which some historians, linguists, and litterateurs chose to project commonplace social and cultural biases, and with which they could positively compare the Arab peoples, providing the latter with a place of distinction among the prominent ‘ajami (non-Arab) civilizations. By conceiving of the Shu‘ubiyya as an instrument of othering, we may account for the conspicuous absence of any self-professed Shu‘ubis, and the peculiar inability of our sources to identify them.