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Notes:

1. God's revelations were first received around 610 by the prophet Muhammad, whose followers later collected them into the Koran, which became the basis for a new religion and community known today as Islam.
2. Though most of the pre-Islamic literature of Arabia was written in verse, prose became a popular vehicle for the dissemination of religious learning.
3. As its title "the Recitation" suggests, the Koran was made to be heard and recited; because it is literally the word of God, Muslims do not accept the Koran in translation from Arabic.
4. Although Persian literature borrowed from Arabic literary styles, it also created and enhanced new poetic styles, including the ruba'i (quatrain), ghazal (erotic lyric), and masnavi (narrative poem).
5. More widely known than any other work in Arabic, the Thousand and One Nights is generally excluded from the canon of classical Arabic literature due to its extravagant and improbable fabrications in prose, a form that was expected to be more serious and substantial than verse.

Text:
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1. God's revelations were first received around 610 by the prophet Muhammad, whose followers later collected them into the Koran, which became the basis for a new religion and community known today as Islam. After Muhammad's death, Islam spread out of Arabia to conquer the Persian and Byzantine empires. Though Muslim invaders were defeated in their attempt to conquer Tours, France, in 732, Islam spread to southern Spain, northern India, the Caucasus, and northern Africa by merchants and traders as much as by military conquest. The Koran forbids conversion by coercion, so Muslim rulers were tolerant of other religions based on revelation, such as Judaism and Christianity. The Islamic civilization was ruled by a succession of caliphs drawn from the prophet's family. In the tenth century, the Muslim community divided into those who believed the caliphate should remain in Muhammad's bloodlines (shi'ites) and those who believed that it should remain within his clan, the Quraysh (sunnis). Islam survived this religious factionalism but, beginning in 1219–1220, was threatened by a Mongol invasion from China. The Mongols were defeated by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt in 1260. In the fourteenth century, the Ottomans inaugurated the last great movement for conquest. Islam now reaches as far as the Balkans, the Philippines, and the Sudan.
2. With the rise of Islam, Arabic shifted from a little-known tribal language to the lingua franca for the Muslim world. Though most of the pre-Islamic literature of Arabia was written in verse, prose became a popular vehicle for the dissemination of religious learning. In the ninth century, Baghdad was established as a center of translation, where Greek science and philosophy, Indian mathematics, Chinese medicine, and Persian literature and natural sciences were translated into Arabic. In Baghdad, poetry began to change form, moving from democratic short verses that were easily memorized by anyone who understood Arabic to the aristocratic adab, or "polite learning," which required extensive knowledge of classical and modern poetry as well as a familiarity with subjects as diverse as theology and agronomy. Due to the Koranic intolerance of fiction, works of popular entertainment, such as the Thousand and One Nights, are generally excluded from the classical canon of Arabic literature.
3. For Muslims, the Koran (al-qur''n) is an earthly duplicate of the divine Koran that exists in paradise. According to Islam, God chose to make his final revelations in order to complete and correct all previous revelations and to make them in Arabic. As its title "the Recitation" suggests, the Koran was made to be heard and recited; because it is literally the word of God, Muslims do not accept the Koran in translation from Arabic. By contrast, the Christian Bible is accepted by believers in translations into any number of languages. The Koran is primarily dialogic: God speaks to Muhammad or gives him messages to recite. There is no narrative thread or history of a single group of people, as in the Jewish and Christian bibles. The revelations were received in verses ('ya), which have been grouped according to subject into larger divisions (Suras). The earliest and shortest Suras evoke the wonder and glory of God; the later and longer ones often include legal prescriptions and sage counsel.
4. By the eleventh century, Persian was established as the second language of Islamic literature. Although Persian literature borrowed from Arabic literary styles, it also created and enhanced new poetic styles including the ruba'i (quatrain), ghazal (erotic lyric), and masnavi (narrative poem). Over the next two centuries, Persian literature flourished with poets drawing on pre-Islamic Iranian lore, courtly and popular literature, as well as Sufi mysticism to create a rich and varied literature. As Islam spread into other parts of Asia—particularly into south Asia—works also were written in Turkish, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Panjabi, Urdu, and other languages. In many areas, especially in the Ottoman empire and parts of India, Persian literature, rather than Arabic, proved to be influential; it was through Persian that the ruba'i, masnavi and ghazal became incorporated into these other languages. The importance of Islam in communities in central Europe, Africa, and other parts of Asia suggests that these literary traditions should be considered a part of Islamic literature.
5. More widely known than any other work in Arabic, the Thousand and One Nights is generally excluded from the canon of classical Arabic literature due to its extravagant and improbable fabrications in prose, a form that was expected to be more serious and substantial than verse. The Nights is an anonymous work whose provenance is uncertain. Due to the Persian names of its principle characters and setting, it was probably begun as a collection of tales in Middle Persian that had been translated from Sanskrit. The core of the Nights is thought to have been translated, perhaps orally, into Arabic at the caliphate court in Baghdad. It circulated widely, particularly in Syria and Egypt, from which the two distinct branches of the manuscript emerged. Stories were added from various sources, including European ones, so that the original character of the Nights was lost.