Thus the story has been told. The preceding pages have brought to the fore some of the complexities and beauties of the culture of letter-writing in the pre-modern Islamic (or Islamic Middle) period. In telling this tale of the secretary and his craft I have attempted to provide the reader with an account that evokes something of the literary, cultural and historical environment of that period. What was originally conceived as an idea to conduct a stylistic analysis of Arabic epistolary prose soon developed into an exploration of writerly culture in the 5th-9th/11th-15th centuries. That is principally why I chose to call this work the ‘culture’ of letter-writing rather than simply ‘letter-writing’. My justification for expanding the remit of this study was that epistolary prose could not be examined in a vacuum. Not only was its relationship with other forms of written and oral transmission so fundamental to its success, but also the life of the secretary, as the composer of the words on the page, was part of the continuum that assured for epistolary writing a position as the dominant literary art form for several centuries.

This study has also attempted to show that the literary culture surrounding epistolary prose evolved at a point in history of great intellectual vibrancy, not just in the Islamic world but also in Western societies. I have made some comparisons between Islamic epistolography and the letter-writing cultures of Greece and Italy from the same period as a move towards establishing the degree of intellectual cross-fertilisation that took place on this subject.