since Allah revealed His Book in Arabic and charged His Messenger to proclaim the Book and the Wisdom in that very tongue—and since the first people to hasten to this religion spoke it as their native speech—there can be no way to safeguard and understand the religion except by safeguarding the language. Mastery of Arabic therefore becomes part of the religion itself. Speaking it enables the people of faith to grasp Allah’s religion more easily, to establish its rites, and to resemble the earliest forerunners among the Muhājirūn and the Anṣār in all their affairs.

God willing, we shall soon cite some of the scholars’ words that command speaking in Arabic and deem it disliked to persist in another language without necessity. Speech is accompanied by other matters—branches of knowledge and traits of character—for customs exert a powerful influence over what Allah loves and what He despises. For this reason the Sacred Law also obliges adherence to the customs of the earliest forerunners in their words and deeds, and it discourages abandoning those customs for others without need.

In sum, the prohibition against resembling them is due to the loss of the virtues Allah granted to the earliest forerunners, or the acquisition of the shortcomings found in others.

Thus, when the believers from among the Persians and others understood this principle, those whom Allah enabled set themselves to strive for a true resemblance to the earliest Muslims. They therefore became among the best of the Successors, excelling until the Day of Resurrection, and many of them became leaders for countless others. For that reason they preferred, among the Persians, those whom they judged to be closest to following the forerunners—so much so that al-Asmaʿī said, as related by Abū Ṭāhir al-Salafī in his book “The Virtues of the Persians,”