The Arabic Language

particular that of parallelism. A famous example is the speech given by al-Ḥajjāj 
(d. 95/714) on the occasion of his inauguration as governor of Kufa:
The Commander of the Believers has emptied his quiver and tested its arrows. He 
found me to be of the firmest wood and of the strongest shaft and shot me at you. As 
long as you gallop in rebellion and recline in the beds of error and follow the stray 
path, by God, I shall skin you like a new stick and bind your leaves like a thorn bush 
and whip you like wandering camels. (
ʾinna ʾamīra l-muʾminīna kabba kinānatahu ṯumma 
ʿajama ʿīdānahā fa-wajadanī ʾamarrahā ʿīdan wa-ʾaṣlabahā ʿamūdan fa-wajjahanī ʾilaykum 
fa-ʾinnakum ṭālamā ʾawḍaʿtum fī l-fitani wa-ḍṭajaʿtum fī marāqidi ḍ-ḍalāli wa-sanantum 
sunana l-ġayyi ʾammā wa-llāhi la-ʾalḥawannakum laḥwa l-ʿaṣā wa-la-ʾaʿṣibannakum ʿaṣba 
s-salamati wa-la-ʾaḍribannakum ḍarba ġarāʾibi l-ʾibil
). (al-Jāḥiẓ, 
al-Bayān wa-t-tabyīn
, II, 
ed. as-Sandūbī, Beirut, n.d., p. 349)
A second genre of texts with roots in the pre-Islamic period is the art of story-
telling. From early times onwards, storytellers (
quṣṣāṣ
) had played an important 
role in the life of the tribe by transmitting stories about the exploits of the tribes 
(
ʾayyām al-ʿArab
), and this tradition was continued in a modified form in early 
Islam when storytellers travelled around recounting the events in the life of the 
Prophet, the early Islamic expeditions and the conquests of foreign countries. 
These stories were meant for the general public and they were no doubt told in 
a lively style, full of fictitious conversations and without any literary embellish-
ments. The topics dealt with by the professional storytellers were also studied by 
scholars. They had in common with the storytellers a certain aversion to writing 
down their reports: only the 
Qurʾān
could be a written book. They did use written 
notes for recording their own memories and those of their informants, but these 
were intended for private use, or for circulation among their students only. 
The earliest efforts to put down in writing systematically the traditions about 
Muḥammad and the early period of the conquests did not start until the end of 
the first century of the Hijra, at a time when the last people who had actually met 

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The Development of Classical Arabic 
75
the Prophet were old men and women who were bound to die soon. This period 
witnessed feverish activity on the part of scholars to collect all they could from 
the last living witnesses.
The best-documented genre in early Islam is the epistolary one. The earliest 
examples of epistolary texts are found in the accounts of the correspondence 
between the Prophet and the tribal chieftains. During the period of the conquests, 
there must have been a constant stream of letters between the central authorities 
in Medina and the commanders in the field. The contents of these letters were 
mostly military or commercial, but no doubt some epistolary conventions existed 
even then. It is impossible to determine to what degree the texts of those letters 
that have been preserved by later historians are authentic. Some historians refer 
to actual documents, for instance, the treaty between the Prophet and the commu
-
nity of Dūmat al-Jandal, which al-Wāqidī (
Maġāzī
, III, p. 1,030) claims to have seen 
personally. But in general we have no guarantee about the authenticity of the exact 
wording, although historians may well have preserved the gist of the contents. The 
same conclusion applies to such texts as the letters of the early caliphs (