Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: deleted by user — October 1, 2024 | Ali Shukri Amin

Bart Ehrman,

"For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books. This is not to say that adherents of the various polytheistic religions had no beliefs about their gods or that they had no ethics, but beliefs and ethics -- strange as this sounds to modern ears -- played almost no role in religion per se. These were instead matters of personal philosophy, and philosophies, of course, could be bookish. Since ancient religions themselves did not require any particular sets of "right doctrines" or, for the most part, "ethical codes," books played almost no role in them.

Judaism was unique in that it stressed its ancestral traditions, customs, and laws, and maintained that these had been recorded in sacred books, which had the status, therefore, of "scripture" for the Jewish people. During the period of our concern -- the first century of the common era, when the books of the New Testament were being written -- Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire understood in particular that God had given direction to his people in the writings of Moses, referred to collectively as the Torah, which literally means something like "law" or "guidance." The Torah consists of five books, sometimes called the Pentateuch (the "five scrolls"), the beginning of the Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Here one finds accounts of the creation of the world, the calling of Israel to be God's people, the stories of Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs and God's involvement with them, and most important (and most extensive), the laws that God gave Moses indicating how his people were to worship him and behave toward one another in community together. These were sacred laws, to be learned, discussed, and followed -- and they were written in a set of books."

[Misquoting Jesus]

The argument that prophet Muhammad was illiterate is as follows: the Arabs were generally ummī (had not received a scripture). This is as opposed to the People of the Book, namely Jews and Christians. Their primary motivation was to learn reading and writing for religious reasons, and since those reasons were absent among the pagans, the pagans mostly did not need to read or right. Therefore, the default assumption of someone raised in pre-Islamic Arabia is illiteracy until proven otherwise. There's no evidence Muhammad was literate, and traditional sources claim otherwise (such as the famous story of, "I cannot read.")

I find the idea that ummī does not equal illiterate to be anachronistic. Ummī means "not a person of the book", yes. To the Judeo-Christian millieu, not having a book meant being unlettered and uneducated as well. There's a very strong correlation between paganism, illiteracy, and lack of a Scripture - even if these things are not directly synonymous.

It's clear that the Quran wants to indicate God alone taught Muhammad what he knew and that It's impossible he received it from other sources. That's not a projection, It's very explicit in the text. If we want to argue that Muhammad had the sort of functional literacy that he could use to read texts independently, this clearly flies in the face of the intents of the Quranic speaker.