[Sidenote: ‘Abdu ’l-Malik and his successors.] [Sidenote: Reforms of ‘Abdu ’l-Malik.] [Sidenote: The writing of Arabic.] [Sidenote: Ḥajjáj b. Yúsuf († 714 A.D.).] ‘Abdu ’l-Malik succeeded his father in 685, but required seven years of hard fighting to make good his claim to the Caliphate. When his most formidable rival, Ibn Zubayr, had fallen in battle (692), the eastern provinces were still overrun by rebels, who offered a desperate resistance to the governor of ‘Iráq, the iron-handed Ḥajjáj. But enough of bloodshed. Peace also had her victories during the troubled reign of ‘Abdu ’l-Malik and the calmer sway of his successors. Four of the next five Caliphs were his own sons--Walíd (705-715), Sulaymán (715-717), Yazíd II (720-724), and Hishám (724-743); the fifth, ‘Umar II, was the son of his brother, ‘Abdu ’l-‘Azíz. For the greater part of this time the Moslem lands enjoyed a well-earned interval of repose and prosperity, which mitigated, though it could not undo, the frightful devastation wrought by twenty years of almost continuous civil war. Many reforms were introduced, some wholly political in character, while others inspired by the same motives have, none the less, a direct bearing on literary history. ‘Abdu ’l-Malik organised an excellent postal service, by means of relays of horses, for the conveyance of despatches and travellers; he substituted for the Byzantine and Persian coins, which had hitherto been in general use, new gold and silver pieces, on which be caused sentences from the Koran to be engraved; and he made Arabic, instead of Greek or Persian, the official language of financial administration. Steps were taken, moreover, to improve the extremely defective Arabic script, and in this way to provide a sound basis for the study and interpretation of the Koran as well as for the collection of _ḥadíths_ or sayings of the Prophet, which form an indispensable supplement thereto. The Arabic alphabet, as it was then written, consisted entirely of consonants, so that, to give an illustration from English, _bnd_ might denote _band_, _bend_, _bind_, or _bond_; _crt_ might stand for _cart_, _carat_, _curt_, and so on. To an Arab this ambiguity mattered little; far worse confusion arose from the circumstance that many of the consonants themselves were exactly alike: thus, _e.g._, it was possible to read the same combination of three letters as _bnt_, _nbt_, _byt_, _tnb_, _ntb_, _nyb_, and in various other ways. Considering the difficulties of the Arabic language, which are so great that a European aided by scientific grammars and unequivocal texts will often find himself puzzled even when he has become tolerably familiar with it, one may imagine that the Koran was virtually a sealed book to all but a few among the crowds of foreigners who accepted Islam after the early conquests. ‘Abdu’l-Malik's viceroy in ‘Iráq, the famous Ḥajjáj, who began life as a schoolmaster, exerted himself to promote the use of vowel-marks (borrowed from the