From the time of the Muslim conquest of the region from the Byzantine Empire in the 630s, Greek had remained the language of the bureaucracy in Syria and the change in 700 formed part of the wider centralization efforts undertaken by Abd al-Malik.
In recognition of this achievement, Sulayman was appointed as the head of Syria's fiscal administration, replacing the Melkite Christian veteran Sarjun ibn Mansur.
[3] According to the historian Martin Sprengling, Sulayman was well-versed in Arabic and Greek, as evidenced by the role he was assigned by Caliph Abd al-Malik as the katib (secretary) for official correspondence.
According to the 9th-century Muslim historians al-Baladhuri and al-Mada'ini, when Abd al-Malik informed Sulayman of his dilemma with Sarjun, the former proposed to the caliph converting the language of the tax administration from Greek to Arabic.
[6] Unlike his Syria-centered predecessors, Abd al-Malik had spent most of his life in Medina, where only Arabic was spoken, and was unfamiliar with other languages or with the Greek and Syrian officials who had dominated the administration in Syria since the Byzantine era.