Arabic literature in its entirety and in the restricted sense is the enduring monument both of a civilization and of a people. The atomicity of pre-Islamic verse and the convention of the monorhyme naturally favoured short compositions on single themes. During the second half of the sixth century AD, a far-reaching change came over the spirit of Arabic poetry. The Umayyad period witnessed a poetic outburst reminiscent of the pre-Islamic one in sixth-century Arabia. The revolution which brought to power a new dynasty, the Abbasids, also opened for Arabic literature its golden age. The political decentralization of the Arab empire in the fourth/tenth century, and the reduction of Baghdad itself in 334/945 to a provincial capital by the Buyids, inevitably affected the course of a literature. The vitality of the Arabic literary tradition was transferred to younger and more vigorous Islamic literatures, whose growth it had directly or indirectly stimulated, namely, Persian, Turkish and Urdu.