There is no doubt that the Arab Islamic conquests of the seventh century led, over time, to a substantial transformation of the political, social and cultural makeup of the Middle East. Although the conquerors initially left in place much of the state apparatus of the Byzantine and Persian Empires, they inevitably made changes that would benefit them, in particular redirecting the tax revenue to their own coffers. Some aspects of the transformation were a direct result of Arab Muslim policies. For example, the caliph ‘ Abd al-Malik (685-705) decreed that Arabic should be made the official language of government, and although the order took time to implement fully, its impact upon the status of Greek was quickly felt and by AD 800 the writing of documents in Greek had all but ceased (see ch. 2 below). Some developments were, by contrast, indirectly caused by the actions of the new elite. Thus restrictions on the movements of Christian men would appear to have had the unintended consequence of increasing somewhat the role of their womenfolk, who were exempt from these restrictions, or at least this is a plausible explanation for the rise in female economic activity evident in documents from early Islamic Egypt (ch. 3). This reordering of Middle East society was for the most part slow and gradual, measured in centuries rather than decades, and the new configuration grew out of and in dialogue with the late antique world that preceded it and so should not be viewed as deriving from the imposition of ideas and values from outside that world. Thus the late Roman system of rescripts was continued and adapted by Muslim judges dispensing justice in Egypt (ch. 6) and when Muslim exegetes sought to explain certain Qur'anic passages on monasticism it was to late antique Christian legends on this topic that they turned for inspiration (ch . 14). This point is taken up in many of the articles below and because I consider it crucial to a proper understanding of t he emergence of Islamic civilization I have enshrined it in the first part of the title of this book: “The Late Antique World of Early Islam”.