Books in the Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Near East series

The Damascus Palm Fragment investigates Arabic's transformative historical phase, the passage from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period, through a new approach. It presents a scenario for the emergence of standard Classical Arabic as the literary language of the late eighth century and beyond.

How did Islam's sacred scripture, the Arabic Qur'an, emerge from western Arabia at a time when the region was religiously fragmented and lacked a clearly established tradition of writing to render the Arabic language? The studies in this volume address different aspects of this question.