A People With No Book

For the Arabs, interestingly enough, there is no book in the Arabic language until the Qurʾān. There is literally no book. They are an ancient people, and yet there is no book in the Arabic language until the Qurʾān. Prior to that, the closest thing that could be considered literary was poetry that was done orally. There were seven odes that were quite popular, which were hung in the Kaʿbah, in the house in Mecca, and were honoured by the Arabs, the pre-Islamic Arabs, as being the quintessence of eloquence and of the Arabic art form of poetry. So when the Qurʾān comes to these people, this is a radical departure from any previous concept within the culture of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge.

The other root that is found here is the word to recite. Qaraʾa in the Arabic language means two things: it means to read, and it means to recite. So it has an oral quality and it has a written quality to it.

There is a really wonderful book, well worth reading, particularly for teachers, called A is for Ox by Barry Sanders. This book is talking about the fact that orality is the substratum of literacy. If one does not have an oral tradition, one cannot have a literate tradition. And one of Sanders's complaints is that our culture is losing its orality. The oral tradition in this culture is dying out because of television and other forms of media, in which visualisation and not orality becomes the dominant means of raising our children.

If one looks at children for the first five years of their life, they are oral creatures. They are in the oral world. They are not literate. They are in the oral world. And traditionally what would happen is that they would hear stories, and their imaginations would be ignited. This was something that took place in all cultures. Now, in this culture, the recent phenomenon is children being raised in front of the television. So the mother is no longer transmitting the oral lore, the childish lore of the culture, to these children; it is in fact being experienced through the medium of visualisation, which is a powerful medium, but it has certain effects. And Sanders believes that one of the effects is a lack of humanisation — he believes that orality is a process of humanisation.

The fact that the Arabs are an oral people is very significant. They are an oral people, and the Qurʾān is a Qurʾān before it is a book. In other words, the real meaning of Qurʾān is the recital. It is the oral book. And the next word by which the Qurʾān is identified is kitāb, which means book. And kataba, the root word, means to join together. It means to join together.