Foundations. From early on Islam produced a broad prose literature of enduring significance. By 1500 the Muslim literary tradition—by then nearly nine hundred years old—was one of the leading traditions of the world and probably the largest in size at that time. Although Muslim literature later came to be written down in a considerable number of languages, until 1500 it was almost entirely written in just two, Arabic and Persian. Though the Muslim canon in either language was enormous by 1500, the Arabic was somewhat larger, in part because it was older, having begun in the seventh century, while Persian Muslim literature began in the tenth. Arabic is the foundational language of Muslim civilization, occupying a role similar to Greek in the classical Graeco-Roman tradition or Sanskrit in the ancient Indian civilization. Under Islam, Persian was an Arabicized form of the pre-Islamic...