Sulayman ibn Sa'd al-Khushani

Abū Thābit Sulaymān ibn Saʿd al-Khūshani was an Arab administrator of the Umayyad Caliphate who proposed and implemented the conversion of Syria's dīwān (tax administration) from Greek to Arabic in 700 under Caliph Abd al-Malik . 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. Sulayman continued in this office under caliphs al-Walid I and Sulayman , the beginning of the reign of Umar II and then again through the reign of Yazid II .

Life Sulayman was from the region of Palestine, in the territory of Jund al-Urdunn, a military district of Syria. The historian Moshe Gil speculates that he was from Tiberias, the administrative capital of Jund al-Urdunn. His father, Sa'd, was a Christian and Sulayman too had possibly been a Christian. 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. By dint of his experience and skill, Sarjun was kept in his post by Abd al-Malik for the majority of his reign. The caliph appointed Sulayman to the department of official correspondence and maintained closer relations with Sulayman, whom he had handpicked at a young age, than the elderly Sarjun, whom he inherited from previous administrations. 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. Moreover, following his victory in the Second Muslim Civil War in 692, he embarked on a major centralization drive, which came with measures to unify the caliphate's widely varied tax systems. Already in 697, the transition from Persian to Arabic in the Iraqi bureaucracy had been carried out by Salih ibn Abd al-Rahman under Abd al-Malik's governor al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf and possibly served as a model for Sulayman to emulate. The order had been kept secret from Sarjun and in less than a year Sulayman completed the transition in 700.

In reward for his accomplishment, Abd al-Malik appointed Sulayman the head of Syria's fiscal administration, a post he held through the reigns of the caliph's sons and successors al-Walid I and Sulayman. and had previously sheltered Yazid III in his Damascus residence during his rebellion against his predecessor, al-Walid II. In the aftermath of the Umayyad dynasty's downfall in 750, Sulayman's family disappears from the historical record.