The roots of Islamic, essentially Arabic, self-expression in the early medieval period lie in the three great literary traditions of the Arabs themselves and of the two peoples whose world-empires had for centuries contended for mastery in the Near East, the Persians and the Greeks. This assertion does not invalidate the subordinate contributions to the rich fabric of Arabic literature from such traditions as the Syriac Christian one – at least for the Syro-Mesopotamian heartlands – and yet others on the peripheries, such as the Coptic one in Egypt and even, at a later date, the Indian one. But in their less culturally xenophobic frames of mind, it was essentially the empires of the Kisrās (Persia) and Qaysars (Byzantium) which the Arabs regarded as their external cultural mentors, albeit with the qualification that these traditions had all lacked the vital transformatory power of Muhammad's revelation and the Islamic faith, the indispensable unifying bond of all Islamic civilization.

In Iraq and Persia, the Arabs made themselves heirs of the Sasanids, at first only in a military and political sense, but gradually as the cultural, literary and artistic heirs also. The process of acculturation was in many ways easier than in (say) Syria or Egypt, and certainly easier than in Andalus (Spain), for in these latter three lands the indigenous Christian culture retained its spiritual and intellectual vitality and its hold on the souls of a substantial proportion of the population; although Christian confidence was temporarily shaken by the successes of Islam, a teleological view of human history and a trust in the ultimate carrying through of God's plan for the redemption of His people allowed for a dark period during which…