Praise be to God! There is no other god except God.
The first revelation was “Read,” and included the statement “God teaches by means of the pen” (96:1-4), and the second revelation was “The Pen” (68:1). The only function of the pen is to write.
Ignorant Muslim scholars of the first two centuries after the Quran could not understand the Quran’s challenge to produce anything like it. They had no idea about the Quran’s mathematical composition, and they knew that many literary giants could have composed works comparable to the Quran. In fact, many such literary giants did claim the ability to produce a literary work as excellent as the Quran. One of the latest claims came from Taha Hussein, the renowned Egyptian writer.
The ignorant Muslim scholars then decided to proclaim Muhammad an illiterate man! They figured that this would make the Quran’s extraordinary literary excellence truly miraculous. The word they relied on to bestow illiteracy upon the Prophet was “UMMY.” Unfortunately for those “scholars,” this word clearly means “Gentile,” or one who does not follow any scripture (Torah, Injeel, or Quran) [see 2:78, 3:20 & 75, 62:2]; it does NOT mean “illiterate.”
Muhammad was a successful merchant. The “Muslim scholars” who fabricated the illiteracy lie forgot that there were no numbers during Muhammad’s time; the letters of the alphabet were used as numbers. As a merchant dealing with numbers every day, Muhammad had to know the alphabet, from one to one thousand.
The Quran tells us that Muhammad wrote down the Quran—Muhammad’s contemporaries are quoted as saying, “These are tales from the past that he wrote down. They are being dictated to him day and night” (25:5). You cannot “dictate” to an illiterate person. The Prophet’s enemies who accuse him of illiteracy abuse Verse 29:48, which relates specifically to previous scriptures.
On the 27th night of Ramadan 13 B.H. (Before Hijerah), Muhammad the soul, the real person, not the body, was summoned to the highest universe and the Quran was given to him (2:97, 17:1, 44:3, 53:1-18, 97:1-5). Subsequently, the angel Gabriel helped Muhammad release a few verses of the Quran at a time, from the soul to Muhammad’s memory. Muhammad memorized and wrote down the verses just released into his mind. When Muhammad died, he left the complete Quran written down with his own hand in the chronological order of revelation, along with specific instructions as to where to place every verse. The divine instructions recorded by the Muhammad were designed to put the Quran together into the final format intended for God’s Final Testament to the world (75:17). The early Muslims did not get around to putting the Quran together until the time of Khalifa Rashed ‘Uthmaan. A committee was appointed to carry out this task.
On the other hand, it is also worth noting that when Muhammad wrote God’s revelations with his own hand, he was writing them in the role of a scribe, and not in the role of a messenger. And therefore, it is not very important whether he wrote them or not, because the Quran was revealed as a recitation. The word “Quran” means “recitation”, and the different written versions of the Quran which are written on earth do not define the Quran. When God promised to preserve the Quran in verse 15:9, He did not promise to preserve the written book, but to preserve the reminder – to preserve it within the minds and hearts of the people. The written versions of the Quran are simply human-made aids to help people recollect the Quran. In written form, the original Quran only exists high up in heaven (43:4). People can choose to write the written earthly versions with whatever symbols they want to represent the sounds of the original recitation. Muhammad in the role of a scribe happened to write it with Arabic letters, because those were the letters which his society was using, but that does not make it the official version. There is no official written version of the Quran on earth. One of the roles of the Mathematical Miracle of the Quran was to help us distinguish which written human-made versions are correct representations of the revealed spoken Quran, because many written human made versions can exist and exist. Therefore, the written human-made versions can also be written with English letters, or Greek letters, or even computer characters, or even with bits inside a computer, (i.e. only with numbers 1 and 0), and they would still have the Mathematical Miracle based on number 19 in them. So, there is no official symbols (letters) of how the Quran should be written. The written symbols are human made. God taught Adam the words, the sounds of things, but not the writing of it. More than about half of how Adam spoke sounded similar to the Arabic of today, but God never taught or officiated the Arabic symbols. If anything, the symbols or the letters which have more merit to be correct are the letters which were used in the tablets of Moses. Those were the only letters which were directly written by God and angels. Moses received them in written form (7:145). And those symbols were in a shape which Moses would understand. Moses, being a Semite, would understand the Proto-Semitic symbols, which are pretty much the Phoenician alphabet. So, even though there is no official symbols chosen by God, if we had to choose one set of symbols, the closest to being correct are the Phoenician letters, which are similar to the English letters of today. So, when God called Muhammad “a gentile”, “an unlettered one”, in the Quran, among other things, it meant that he is someone who does not know how to read the Phoenician letters with which originally the people of the scripture wrote God’s previous revelations.
Friday Sermon based on Appendix 28 of the Authorized English Translation of the Quran by Rashad Khalifa (1989)