From this period of Arab influence, new words such as orange, sugar, coffee, sofa, satin, algorithm, and algebra filtered into the languages of Europe and eventually into our own.

Because God spoke to Muhammed in Arabic, Muslims venerated the Arabic language. Thus, to Muslims, Arabic calligraphy itself became an art form. It was the chief form of embellishment on all the mosques of the Arab world, and the religious and public buildings of Palermo, Cordoba, Lisbon and Malaga are resplendent with it.

The Arabic language is rich and pliant, and poetry, literature, and drama have left their mark on both East and West. Among the earliest publications of the Arabs were the translations into Arabic of the Greek and Roman classics – the works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, Dioscorides and Galen. Some note that the poet Nizami's translations of the twelfth century romance, Layla and Majnun, may have been an inspiration for the later work, Romeo and Juliet. Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqzan ("Alive, Son of Awake"), considered by many to be the first real novel, was translated by Pocock into Latin in 1671 and by Simon Ockley into English in 1708. It bears many similarities to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. A Thousand and One Nights and Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat are among the best loved and most widely read of Arab literature. The fascination with Arabic, following the Hellenistic period of Louis XIV, is particularly evident in Shakespeare's characterizations of the Moors (Othello and the Price of Morocco), in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, and in George Peel's The Battle of Alcazar.

Besides influencing belles letters, the Arabs developed a system of historiography called isnad. This procedure documents all reliable sources and it provides the modern historian with accurate and comprehensive materials. Foremost among these historiographers was Ibn Khaldun, of whose Book of Examples Arnold Toynbee writes: "Ibn Khaldun has conceived and formulated a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time".

Will Durant writes in The Story of Civilization, IV The Age of Faith, p. 236: "... throughout Islam -- through whatever diversity of peoples -- the language of learning and literature was Arabic; Latin had no wider realm. ...."

Al-Hajjaj Ben Yusuf (?-714), Governor of Iraq under the Umayyad Caliphates of Abdul al-Malik and Walid, was a former schoolmaster and revolutionized Arabic orthography by introducing diacritical marks.

Islamic scholars in the period 632-1058 extended grammar; developed dictionaries,