ABSTRACT
Arabic books abounded in the outgoing second/eighth and third/ninth century, and their subjects ranged from the sciences and the arts via craft trades to popular literature. This was the case in part because the government consulted scholars and commissioned books on issues of religious law and doctrine, Arabic language, Islamic history, and foreign sciences. Classical Arabic historical sources are generally of little help here, revealing their social biases. The leniency of his caliphal employers, who cannot have been unaware of his attitude, is surprising, because it implied disparagement of that Arabic genealogy on which the Abbasids's claim to legitimate rulership partly rested. A fair portion of the earliest Arabic book fragments preserved are Christian texts and the role of the monasteries in early Arabic book production remains to be studied. However, the adoption of the book for the Arabic textual tradition and its rapid paper-based circulation were new phenomena.
