In the domain of artistic prose it is the spoken, rather than the written word that we primarily associate with the Umayyads. In the various sectors of Umayyad public life it was necessary for a man, whether preacher, governor or general, to declaim in clear and vigorous language the views he commanded or recommended. Khatābah (not kitābah) was the strategic instrument of practical politics, and its essential nature is known to us even if we cannot accept as genuine all specimens of the genre that are attributed to the period. We can, in short, be sure that the political and religious leaders of the Umayyad period, of whatever persuasion or affiliation, struck out a vein of strong native rhetoric and afforded the raw material for the development of an artistic prose literature. But while preachers, governors and generals cultivated the practice of pulpit oratory and martial rhetoric, the Arabic tongue was being subjected to a process of growth in a different direction and expanding, under the hands of the secretarial class, into a language of written prose composition suited to the needs of the court and the administration.

The precise point at which the process began is difficult to ascertain, but it is axiomatic that ‘Abd al-Malik's substitution of Arabic for Greek and Persian in the imperial bureaux from 78/697 onwards contained within it the seeds of all future developments in the field of Arabic secretarial literature.