Although the rich oral tradition of Arab and Islamic society will never be totally replaced, there came a point in Islamic history when the written word began to assume increasing significance and potency. In this chapter I set out to show how the power of the pen prevailed in the domain of communication in pre-modern Islamic society. Its supremacy dominated not just in the face of a strong oral culture, but also in the context of a prominent military one in which the sword and its wielders, that is to say, the military, often contested power in that society. The secretaries, who were mainly from the bureaucratic caste, were ideally placed as influential members of the state to promote the power of the written word, with which they had been entrusted as overseers of diplomatic communication.

Equally, I want to show how textual culture became fully systematised in premodern Islamic society in a similar way to Western society. Toorawa puts the relationship between writing and orality very well: ‘one of the curious effects of writing is that it does not reduce orality but, rather, enhances it by organizing the principles by which it is practiced into an art’.