A Hundred and One Rules

The Arabic language developed through the early centuries in the Arabian
Peninsula in the era immediately preceding the appearance of Islam, when it acquired the
form in which it is known today. Arab poets of the pre-Islamic period had developed a
language of amazing richness and flexibility. For the most part, their poetry was
transmitted and preserved orally. The Arabic language was then, as it is now, easily
capable of creating new words and terminology in order to adapt to the demand of new
scientific and artistic discoveries. As the new believers in the seventh century spread out
from the Peninsula to create a vast empire, first with its capital in Damascus and later in
Baghdad, Arabic became the administrative language of vast section of the Mediterranean
world. It drew upon Byzantine and Persian terms and its own immense inner resources of
vocabulary and grammatical flexibility.