The epistle as a representation of Arabic literary genres has a long history. Literary and historical sources abound with examples of letters allegedly exchanged during the early Islamic period. Collections of these examples have been assembled by modern scholars in an attempt to illustrate the importance of the epistle as a record of early political and social activity in Islamic society, and also as documental evidence of early Arabic prose style. Written contracts and epistles undoubtedly existed at the advent of Islam, and the commandment to register debts with a scribe is found in the Qur'ān. Some scholars believe that epistolography, the art or science of letter-writing, developed fairly quickly into the most important form of writing in Islamic society. The productivity of secretaries and other writers subsequently made of epistolography a voluminous contribution to Arabic literary art forms.

In the first chapter of this work I am going to examine the background to letter-writing in pre-modern Islamic society with specific focus on the 5th-9th/11th-15th centuries. Although it can be assumed a priori that many of the characteristics of letter-writing in pre-modern Islamic society are indicative of cultural, historical and to a lesser extent intellectual, trends, as well as of course reflecting a very unique literary style, it is important to assess to what extent the sophisticated elements of letter-writing in Western culture might have influenced Arabic epistolary writing during the period under review here, or vice versa. All of this discussion will be set against the wider context of inšā’, the technical Arabic term for composition within the domain of artistic prose, and how inšā’ has survived as an academic discipline until today.