Was Muhammad illiterate? 5 answers on ummi, Iqra and clots

The objection assumes that ummī in the Quran means “cannot read”. Classical commentators often did take it that way, and some linked it to umm, “mother”, as in one who remains as his mother bore him. That reading is old and respectable, and it is the one most translators follow in 7:157-158.^[1]

The Quran also uses the plural ummiyyūn for a whole community. In 62:2 God raised a messenger “among the ummiyyīn, from themselves”. In 3:20 and 3:75 the word sets the Arabs against the People of the Book, those who already held a scripture. In 2:78 it describes people who know the Book only through wishes. Many modern scholars conclude that the word often means “of the nations without a scripture”, a sense that says nothing about any individual’s skill with a pen.^[2] The two senses are not exclusive, and the Quran never needs to choose. The critic is right that 7:157 alone cannot settle the matter.

The clearest verse is 29:48: “You did not recite any book before it, nor write one with your right hand; then the doubters would have had cause to doubt.”^[3] It is addressed to his own townspeople, who had known him for forty years. A claim of that kind is risky if it is false, because those who heard it could contradict it from memory.

The Quran records what his opponents did say. They charged that a man was teaching him, and the answer given in 16:103 is that the man they hinted at spoke a foreign tongue while this recitation is in clear Arabic.^[4] They also charged in 25:5 that he had “had them written down” and that they were dictated to him morning and evening.^[5] That accusation is one of dictation to a scribe. The sources record no accusation from Quraysh that he read the text from a page. Note the limit of the argument: 29:48 speaks of books before the revelation. It does not say that he could never, at any later time, form a letter.

The first revelation (96:1-5) begins iqraʾ. In the report from Aisha in Sahih al-Bukhari, the Book of the Beginning of Revelation, the angel says “Read”, he answers “I am not a reader”, and the angel presses him until he repeats the words.^[6] The critic reads this as an order to do something he could not do.

The verb qaraʾa means to read, but also to recite aloud, and the Quran itself uses the related noun qurʾān for a recitation (75:17-18).^[7] On that sense the command is “recite what is given to you”, and the words follow at once: “in the name of your Lord who created”. The angel did not hand him a page to decipher. The report also keeps his protest, and the fear he felt on returning to Khadija. A reader may take that as the account of a man surprised by what had happened to him. Whether one takes the story as true or not, it does not describe a test of literacy that he failed.

Verse 96:2 says that man was created “from ʿalaq“. Many English translations say “clot”, which sounds crude, and critics add that a clot is not what a human is made from. The root ʿ-l-q means to cling or hang on. Classical dictionaries and commentators gave the sense of a clot of blood, and also of something that clings, and some translators now write “a clinging thing”.^[8]

The same word appears in 22:5 and 23:14 as one stage in a sequence: a drop (nuṭfa), then ʿalaqa, then a morsel of flesh (muḍgha), then bones clothed in flesh.^[9] The purpose of 96:2 is to point to the lowly origin of the person who is told in the next verse that his Lord is most generous. Muslim writers differ on how closely these stages match modern embryology, and the article 7 scientific claims about the Quran, graded on the evidence takes up that question. The narrow point here is that the word has a documented range of meaning, and “absurd” is a judgement made after choosing the least generous translation.

The strongest evidence for the critic is a report of the treaty of Hudaybiyya. In one wording in Sahih al-Bukhari, in the chapter on the make-up pilgrimage in the Book of Military Expeditions, the Prophet took the document, “did not write well”, and wrote.^[10] Ibn Hajar observes that the words “did not write well” are missing from the same report in the Book of Peacemaking and from Sahih Muslim, where Ali is the writer and the Prophet only has the phrase erased.^[11] Most scholars read the first as meaning that he ordered the text written. A few medieval scholars held that he did write a little near the end of his life, and that this does not contradict the Quran, since 29:48 speaks of the time before the revelation.^[12]

This is a real dispute among Muslims, and it should be stated as one. It also shows why the “both ways” charge fails. The Quran claims that he was not a writer of scripture before the revelation, and that is all it claims. The Muslim case for the Quran rests on its text and on the challenge of 2:23, and not on a fixed fact about his handwriting. If a later report showed that he could sign a treaty, the claim of 29:48 would stand as written.