... either at the center or in the provinces. However, the Arabs had one great lasting success: Throughout a large part of the subjugated territories, Arabic became the dominant language and Islam the predominant religion. (Large-scale conversions were not overall achieved by force. A major motive in the adoption of Islam by "non-believers" was the social and economic discrimination suffered by non-Moslems.) This cultural assimilation made possible the so-called golden age of Arabic culture. "The invaders from the desert," writes Professor Philip K. Hitti, the foremost modem Arab historian, "brought with them no tradition of learning, no heritage of culture to the lands they conquered . . . They sat as pupils at the feet of the peoples they subdued." What we therefore call "Arabic civilization" was Arabian neither in its origins and fundamental structure nor in its principal ethnic aspects. The purely Arabic contribution in it was in the linguistic and to ...

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