The institutions set up mainly to investigate more fully the Islamic religion were invaluable in studying many other subjects. Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik was instrumental in enriching the literature by instructing scholars to translate works into Arabic. The first was probably Aristotle's correspondence with Alexander the Great translated by Salm Abu al-'Ala'. From the east, and in a very different literary genre, the scholar Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa translated the animal fables of the "Panchatantra". These translations would keep alive scholarship and learning, particularly that of ancient Greece, during the Dark Ages in Europe and the works would often be first re-introduced to Europe from the Arabic versions.