"Arabic became a lingua franca every bit as potent as Latin and Greek. As a result it was as useful to scholars as it was to civil servants. During the Middle Ages Arab scholars compiled, translated, and preserved hundreds of thousands of texts from across the classical world, and the Arab-speaking Islamic world inherited the Greek and Latin world’s position as the west’s most advanced intellectual and scientific society. This would not have been possible without al-Malik’s decision in the 690s to impose the Arabic language on the Umayyad caliphate’s bureaucrats. Yet this was not all. Arabic was more than a tool of bureaucracy and study. Unlike Latin, for example, Arabic was the language in which God himself had spoken. The Qur’an had been revealed to Muhammad in Arabic; it was preserved in Arabic; the first Muslims were Arabs who were by definition Arabic speakers; and the call to prayer (adhan) that had rung out from mosques ever since it was sung from the Ka‘ba when Muhammad captured Mecca in 630 was made in lilting, musical Arabic. It was impossible to imagine Islam without the language of its first people, and once that language became mandatory for all who wished to interact with the state, the faith did not follow too far behind. From the early eighth century, Arabization was gradually followed by conversion across the Muslim-held territories—a shift that can still be seen, felt, and heard in almost every part of the old medieval caliphate in the twenty-first century.*"