Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: response refutation a moderator from — May 31, 2024 | Ali Shukri Amin

Al-Jallad,

... As Stein has pointed out, the wording of even the most personal letters suggests that the sender did not compose the text himself himself, and that recipients were not expected to read them.

To explain this, he hypothesized the existence of scribal centres where documents were composed on the behalf of their authors. On the other hand, Macdonald draws our attention to another category of inscriptions in South Arabia that intimates widespread knowledge of reading and writing graffiti. ... The existence of thousands of graffiti in South Arabia, always composed in the monumental and only rarely the minuscule script, suggests that a sizable segment of the population could employ writing for informal purposes. ...

The evidence for the major oasis towns of North and West Arabia is not as plentiful. Nevertheless, after a close and skillful analysis of the material, focusing mainly on the appearance of informal letter forms and ligatures in the inscriptions, Macdonald concluded that the settled populations of these areas also belonged to literate societies and, as in South Arabia, large segments of the population knew how to write, and presumably, read (2010: 9 –15).

(Al-Jallad, "[The Linguistic Landscape of Pre-Islamic Arabia](https://www.academia.edu/43141064/Al-Jallad._2020._The_Linguistic_Landscape_of_pre-Islamic_Arabia_--_Context_for_the_Qur_an)," pp. 116–117)

Al-Jallad is pointing out the sophistication of the scribal practice and development of Arabic written form before Islam. I don't think he is pointing out that Arabs were massively educated. This doesn't make sense with what we know about semi-nomadic cultures or from an anthropological sense.

A large segment of the society knowing how to read in the pre-modern world would be 5-10% of people that could afford to go to scribal school or were sponsored to do so for a particular purpose.

It would be really strange that the early Muslims made such a point of Muhammad's illiteracy if so many people were literate and it wasn't rare in any sense to be literate.

It seems you are just not familiar with what literacy looked like in the pre-modern world generally, then are applying these terms that suggested the Jahili Arabs were "literate" to this misconception. A highly-literate society in the pre-modern world is 10-15% literacy. That's the standard.

Bart Ehrman,

"This applies even to ancient societies that we might associate with reading and writing — for example, Rome during the early Christian centuries, or even Greece during the classical period. The best and most influential study of literacy in ancient times, by Columbia University professor William Harris, indicates that at the very best of times and places — for example, Athens at the height of the classical period in the fifth century B.C.E. — literacy rates were rarely higher

than 10-15 percent of the population. To reverse the numbers, this means that under the best of conditions, 85-90 percent of the population could not read or write. In the first Christian century, throughout the Roman Empire, the literacy rates may well have been lower.

As it turns out, even defining what it means to read and write is a very complicated business. Many people can read but are unable to compose a sentence, for example. And what does it mean to read? Are people literate if they can manage to make sense of the comic strips but not the editorial page? Can people be said to be able to write if they can sign their name but cannot copy a page of text?

The problem of definition is even more pronounced when we turn to the ancient world, where the ancients themselves had difficulty defining what it meant to be literate. One of the most famous illustrative examples comes from Egypt in the second Christian century. Throughout most of antiquity, since most people could not write, there were local "readers" and "writers" who hired out their services to people who needed to conduct business that required written texts: tax receipts, legal contracts, licenses, personal letters, and the like. In Egypt, there were local officials who were assigned the task of overseeing certain governmental tasks that required writing. These assignments as local (or village) scribes were not usually sought after: as with many "official" administrative posts, the people who were required to take them were responsible for paying for the job out-of-pocket. These jobs, in other words, went to the wealthier members of the society and carried a kind of status with them, but they required the expenditure of personal funds."

There's a clear reason you see an explosion in authorship and extant texts about 100 years after the Hijrah. Muslim conquerors went as far afield as China, Islam encouraged literacy/education, and paper suddenly became available. The idea that having little access to paper is detrimental to learning how to read and write is silly. You can only leave a rock inscription after learning how to read and write, to do that you need some degree of disposable writing material, or at least a washable tablet (something that has never been a part of Hijazi culture).

I think your reading of these quotes is colored by a misunderstanding of certain anthropological realities of pre-modernity and is less of an academic study of Islam issue.