Read

The first word

A man sits alone in a cave on a mountain outside Makkah. He has come there for days at a time, with a little food, to worship. He cannot read. He has never written his name. Then the angel comes and gives him one command: Read.

He answers: I do not know how to read. The angel takes hold of him and presses him until he cannot bear it, then lets him go. Read. I do not know how to read. Pressed again. Released again. Read. A third time. Then the angel recites, and the first words of the last revelation enter the world.

ٱقْرَأْ بِٱسْمِ رَبِّكَ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ ۝ خَلَقَ ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ مِنْ عَلَقٍ ۝ ٱقْرَأْ وَرَبُّكَ ٱلْأَكْرَمُ ۝ ٱلَّذِى عَلَّمَ بِٱلْقَلَمِ ۝ عَلَّمَ ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ مَا لَمْ يَعْلَمْ

Iqra' bismi rabbika alladhi khalaq. Khalaqa al-insana min 'alaq. Iqra' wa rabbuka al-akram. Alladhi 'allama bil-qalam. 'Allama al-insana ma lam ya'lam

Recite in the name of your Lord who created, created man from a clinging substance. Recite, and your Lord is the most Generous, who taught by the pen, taught man that which he knew not. (Surah Al-'Alaq 96:1-5)

He went home trembling to Khadijah and asked her to cover him. Look at the order of that night. Allah did not send the first word to a scholar. He sent it to a man who said he could not do it, and then He taught him. The command came first. The ability followed.

Five ayat, and four of them are about reading and teaching: read, read again, the pen, what man did not know. Before a single law, before the prayer was fixed, before the fast, Allah told this Ummah to read. I wrote about what that command means in an age of machines that read in Understand. This essay is about what reading does to a man who obeys it.

Sahih al-Bukhari 3 · Quran 96:1-5

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The word

Iqra comes from the root q-r-'. Lane's Lexicon gives its first meaning as gathering a thing together, part to part. From that comes reading and reciting: drawing letters together into words, and words into speech. The name of the Book comes from the same root. Al-Quran. The reading. The recitation.

The image fits the man as well as the page. A reader gathers. He takes the scattered pieces of the world, a fact from one book, a story from another, a warning from a third, and draws them together into judgment. The man who does not read has the same day in front of him and nothing to gather it with.

Lane's Lexicon on q-r-'

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Knowledge was the first rank

When Allah told the angels He would place a successor on the earth, they asked about the blood that would be spilled. Allah answered them with knowledge. He taught Adam, ʿalayhi as-⁠salām, the names, all of them, then set the things before the angels and said: tell Me their names, if you are truthful (2:31). The angels did not claim what they lacked:

قَالُوا۟ سُبْحَٰنَكَ لَا عِلْمَ لَنَآ إِلَّا مَا عَلَّمْتَنَآ ۖ إِنَّكَ أَنتَ ٱلْعَلِيمُ ٱلْحَكِيمُ

Qalu subhanaka la 'ilma lana illa ma 'allamtana, innaka anta al-'Alimu al-Hakim

They said, Exalted are You; we have no knowledge except what You have taught us. Indeed, it is You who is the Knowing, the Wise. (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:32)

Then Adam told them the names (2:33). The first distinction Allah showed between man and the angels was what man could be taught. That is the rank you were created to hold, and reading is how a man keeps climbing it.

Allah shows it again when He chooses leaders. The Children of Israel asked for a king, and their prophet named Talut. They objected that he had no wealth. Their prophet answered:

إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ ٱصْطَفَىٰهُ عَلَيْكُمْ وَزَادَهُۥ بَسْطَةًۭ فِى ٱلْعِلْمِ وَٱلْجِسْمِ

Inna Allaha istafahu 'alaykum wa zadahu bastatan fil-'ilmi wal-jism

Indeed, Allah has chosen him over you and has increased him abundantly in knowledge and stature. (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:247)

They looked for money. Allah looked for a mind and a body. Knowledge comes first in the ayah, then strength. A man who trains his body and starves his mind has built half of what Allah measured in a leader.

Yusuf, ʿalayhi as-⁠salām, walked out of prison into the court of Egypt, and when the king offered him a place, he named the job himself:

قَالَ ٱجْعَلْنِى عَلَىٰ خَزَآئِنِ ٱلْأَرْضِ ۖ إِنِّى حَفِيظٌ عَلِيمٌۭ

Qala ij'alni 'ala khaza'ini al-ard, inni hafizun 'alim

He said, Appoint me over the storehouses of the land. Indeed, I will be a knowing guardian. (Surah Yusuf 12:55)

Hafiz, a guardian: he could be trusted. 'Alim, one who knows: he could do the work. Character and competence in two words. Allah gave Dawud and Sulayman, ʿalayhi as-⁠salām, knowledge, and the first thing they said was praise to the One who favored them with it (27:15). And Musa, ʿalayhi as-⁠salām, a prophet who had spoken with Allah, walked until he found a servant who knew what he did not, and asked him: may I follow you so that you teach me sound judgment (18:66)? The strongest man in that story made himself a student.

Quran 2:30-33 · Quran 2:246-247 · Quran 12:55 · Quran 27:15 · Quran 18:60-66

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Reading makes a man capable

Multidimensional Analysis helps here, because reading works on a man along more than one line at once: his competence, his freedom, his conversation, his health. Take them one at a time.

Competence first. The Prophet ﷺ needed a man he could trust with his letters to the Jews, and he told a young companion, Zayd ibn Thabit, to learn their writing. Zayd said that half a month did not pass before he had it. After that he wrote the Prophet's letters to them and read their letters to him. Fifteen days of study made a young man the trusted hand of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.

Years later, after the battle of Yamamah killed many of the men who carried the Quran in their hearts, Abu Bakr sent for that same Zayd. He told him: you are a wise young man, we have no suspicion of you, and you used to write the revelation for the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, so search for the Quran and collect it. Zayd's literacy put him at the center of the most important task in the history of this Ummah.

The pattern carried into the civilization that came after. MacTutor, the history of mathematics archive at the University of St Andrews, records that the caliph al-Ma'mun founded an academy in Baghdad called the House of Wisdom, where Greek scientific works were translated, along with a great library of manuscripts. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked there. He read what the ancients had left, and then he wrote Hisab al-jabr wal-muqabala, which gave the world the word algebra and which MacTutor calls the first book written on the subject. The word algorithm comes from his name. The readers built the tools the modern world still runs on.

A man does not need to be a scholar to collect on this. In my experience, the man who reads in his own trade, his craft, his business, his health, his deen, outworks the man who only repeats what he was shown once. That is my observation, not a study, and any man can test it on himself over a single year of reading.

Jami at-Tirmidhi 2715, hasan per Darussalam · Sunan Abi Dawud 3645, hasan sahih per Al-Albani · Sahih al-Bukhari 4986 · MacTutor: al-Khwarizmi

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Reading makes a man hard to own

Freedom second. Frederick Douglass was a boy in Baltimore when his master's wife began teaching him the alphabet. Her husband found out and stopped it. Douglass recorded what the man said in his Narrative, published in 1845: if you teach him how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable.

Douglass heard it and understood. From that moment, he wrote, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. He carried bread with him on his errands and gave it to the hungry white boys of the neighborhood, and in return they gave him what he called the more valuable bread of knowledge. The man who owned him knew exactly what reading does. It makes a man impossible to manage by anyone but Allah.

There are other ways to own a man now. A feed can decide what he fears, what he wants and who he hates, and he will call it his own opinion. Allah gave the believer a standing order against it: if a sinful one brings you news, investigate, lest you harm a people out of ignorance and become, over what you have done, regretful (49:6). And do not pursue that of which you have no knowledge; the hearing, the sight and the heart will all be questioned (17:36).

A man cannot investigate with an empty mind. He needs history to recognize an old lie in new clothes, and words to name what is being done to him. A reader can check a claim against what he already knows. Everyone else takes the news as it comes and calls it his own view.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative, chapters 6 and 7 · Quran 49:6 · Quran 17:36

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Reading makes a man worth listening to

Conversation third. Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich gathered the research in What Reading Does for the Mind, published by the American Federation of Teachers in 1998. Using counts by Hayes and Ahrens, they compared how many rare words, words outside the vocabulary of a child in the middle grades, appear in every thousand words of different sources. Adult books carried 52.7. Popular prime-time television carried 22.7. College graduates talking to their friends and spouses carried 17.3. Their conclusion was blunt: conversation is not a substitute for reading.

They pressed the point that these words are tools rather than decoration, and quoted the scholar Olson on what a man loses without them: the distinctions life requires, between a mistake and an accident, a falsehood and a lie, an intention and a promise. A man who reads can say what he means. And a man who can say what he means can lead a meeting, settle a dispute, teach his son and court his wife.

That is where interest comes from. A man becomes interesting when he has been more places than his own life could take him. Allah opened Surah Yusuf by telling His Prophet ﷺ: We relate to you the best of stories in what We have revealed to you of this Quran, although you were, before it, among the unaware (12:3). Stories enlarge a man. The reader sits down at a table carrying the lives of men who died a thousand years ago, and he has something to give the people around him besides complaints about the week.

The Prophet ﷺ tied this to character. People are like minerals, he said. The best of them before Islam are the best of them in Islam, if they gain understanding. The raw metal is your nature. Understanding is what refines it.

Cunningham and Stanovich, What Reading Does for the Mind (1998) · Quran 12:3 · Sahih al-Bukhari 3493

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Reading keeps the mind alive

Health last. Avni Bavishi, Martin Slade and Becca Levy of the Yale School of Public Health followed 3,635 adults in the American Health and Retirement Study for up to twelve years, and published the results in Social Science and Medicine in 2016 under the title A Chapter a Day. After adjusting for age, education, wealth, health and other factors, the people who read books had a 20 percent lower risk of dying during those years than the people who did not. The advantage was greater for books than for newspapers and magazines, and the researchers found that cognition carried part of the effect.

Read that study as it was written. It shows an association, not proof that books add years, and the authors say so carefully. What it does show is that the mind is kept the way the body is kept: by use. Our lives are written by Allah. What we do with the mind He gave us is ours to answer for.

Bavishi, Slade and Levy, A Chapter a Day (2016)

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What Allah says about the one who knows

Allah draws the line Himself. Say: are those who know equal to those who do not know? Only people of understanding remember (39:9). He raises those who believe and those who were given knowledge by degrees (58:11). He praises those who listen to speech and follow the best of it (39:18). And He names the fruit of real knowledge: only those of His servants who have knowledge truly fear Him (35:28). Knowledge that ends in fear of Allah is the knowledge He praises.

He gives wisdom to whom He wills, and whoever has been given wisdom has been given much good (2:269). He made the way in easy: We have certainly made the Quran easy for remembrance, so is there any who will remember? (54:17). Then He asks the question every reader has to answer:

أَفَلَا يَتَدَبَّرُونَ ٱلْقُرْءَانَ أَمْ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبٍ أَقْفَالُهَآ

Afala yatadabbaruna al-Qur'ana am 'ala qulubin aqfaluha

Then do they not reflect upon the Quran, or are there locks upon their hearts? (Surah Muhammad 47:24)

Reading the words opens the door. Reflecting on them is walking through it.

Quran 39:9 · Quran 58:11 · Quran 39:18 · Quran 35:28 · Quran 2:269 · Quran 54:17 · Quran 47:24

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What the Prophet ﷺ said about the reader

He ranked men by it. The best among you are those who learn the Quran and teach it.

He named the one envy worth having. Do not wish to be like anyone except two: a man Allah gave wealth who spends it rightly, and a man Allah gave wisdom who acts on it and teaches it.

He told you how to recognize the man Allah wants good for. If Allah wants good for a person, He gives him understanding of the religion.

He promised the Book would speak for you. Recite the Quran, for on the Day of Resurrection it will come as an intercessor for those who recite it. He counted it letter by letter: whoever recites a letter from the Book of Allah receives a good deed, and the good deed is multiplied ten times. Alif Lam Mim is not one letter; Alif is a letter, Lam is a letter and Mim is a letter.

And he opened the road to Paradise with it. Whoever walks a path seeking knowledge, Allah makes easy for him a path to Paradise. When people gather in a house of Allah to recite His Book and study it together, tranquillity descends on them, mercy covers them, and the angels surround them.

Sahih al-Bukhari 5027 · Sahih al-Bukhari 73 · Sahih al-Bukhari 71 · Sahih Muslim 804a · Jami at-Tirmidhi 2910, hasan per Darussalam · Sahih Muslim 2699a

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Why men stop reading

Systems Thinking shows the loop. A man wakes and reaches for the phone before he reaches for anything else. The feed hands him a stream of short pieces, each one finished before his attention has to work. His patience for a page shrinks. The Book feels slow, so he opens it less, and the less he opens it the slower it feels. That loop is my observation of men, mine included, and every man can test it against the first ten minutes of his own morning.

Dialectical Thinking demands the objections. The first: I am not a reader.

The first man commanded to read said he could not, and Allah taught him. Zayd learned a foreign script in half a month. Reading is a skill a man builds the way he builds a deadlift: with reps, starting light.

The second: I cannot read Arabic. The Prophet ﷺ answered it. The one who is skilled in the Quran is with the noble, righteous scribes, the angels, and the one who stumbles through it and finds it hard has two rewards. The man who stammers through one line tonight is paid twice for it.

The third: I have no time. You were promised ten good deeds for a single letter. A man with no time for a page has time for a line, and a line holds dozens of letters. The scale was built for a busy man.

The fourth: I listen to podcasts. Listen to them. But the research above found conversation no substitute for the page, and in my judgment a book gives a man three things a voice in his ear does not: his own pace, the line he can read twice, and the margin where he argues back.

The fifth is the serious one: books make men arrogant. Some do. Allah described people who carried the Torah and did not live by it as a donkey carrying volumes of books (62:5). Knowledge that ends in pride was never knowledge Allah praised. The knowledge He praised ends in fear of Him (35:28), and the angels showed its manners: we have no knowledge except what You have taught us (2:32).

And the Book lifts whoever carries it. 'Umar met his governor of Makkah and asked whom he had left in charge of the people of the valley. A freed slave, the man said. 'Umar asked why. Because he knows the Book of Allah well, the man answered, and he knows its rulings. 'Umar said: the Prophet ﷺ said that by this Book Allah raises some people and lowers others.

Sahih Muslim 798a · Jami at-Tirmidhi 2910 · Quran 62:5 · Quran 35:28 · Sahih Muslim 817a

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What to read

A man has a few hours a week. Spend them in order.

The Quran first, every day, with its meaning beside it. Then the life and words of the Prophet ﷺ: the seerah, his biography, and the hadith collections, beginning with Bukhari and Muslim. Then the books of your trade, whatever puts food on your table and makes you useful to people. Then history, so you recognize the present when it repeats the past. Then the great books of men who thought hard about how to live, read with the Quran as the measure.

One book at a time, finished before the next. A pen in hand. A man who reads ten books carefully is better armed than the man who started a hundred.

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The practice

The rules come from the Quran and the Sunnah (the example of the Prophet ﷺ). The order is mine.

1. Open the Book before the phone. After Fajr, read before you scroll. The first word Allah sent down was Read (96:1).
2. Keep a fixed portion of the Quran every day, even a small one. Every letter carries ten good deeds (Jami at-Tirmidhi 2910).
3. Read it with the meaning beside you. A translation and a tafsir (an explanation of the Quran), so the words reach the heart (47:24). The surah guides in Quran Study were written for this.
4. Stumble through the Arabic anyway. The one who finds it hard has two rewards (Sahih Muslim 798a).
5. Recite slowly. Recite the Quran with measured recitation (73:4). Speed is the habit of the feed.
6. Give one more book thirty minutes a day. Your trade, the seerah or history, one book at a time, finished before the next.
7. Read with a pen. Mark what you will use, and write one line in the margin where you disagree.
8. Learn one thing and teach it the same day. The best of you learn the Quran and teach it (Sahih al-Bukhari 5027). Tell your wife, your son or a brother.
9. Check before you repeat. Before you share a claim, investigate it (49:6).
10. Ask for more. The Prophet ﷺ was told to say it: Rabbi zidni 'ilma. My Lord, increase me in knowledge (20:114).

Quran 96:1 · Jami at-Tirmidhi 2910 · Quran 47:24 · Sahih Muslim 798a · Quran 73:4 · Sahih al-Bukhari 5027 · Quran 49:6 · Quran 20:114

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The quiet work

Reading makes no noise. A book open on the table before dawn. A finger under a line of Arabic it cannot yet say well. A word you looked up, understood and kept. A margin full of a man arguing with himself until he is better than he was.

No one sees the hours. They see what the hours make: a man who can do the work, who cannot be easily fooled, who has something worth saying, and who fears Allah because he knows Him better. The man in the cave said he could not read. Allah told him to read anyway, and taught him. He will teach you too, if you open the Book.

ٱقْرَأْ وَرَبُّكَ ٱلْأَكْرَمُ ۝ ٱلَّذِى عَلَّمَ بِٱلْقَلَمِ ۝ عَلَّمَ ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ مَا لَمْ يَعْلَمْ

Iqra' wa rabbuka al-akram. Alladhi 'allama bil-qalam. 'Allama al-insana ma lam ya'lam

Recite, and your Lord is the most Generous, who taught by the pen, taught man that which he knew not. (Surah Al-'Alaq 96:3-5)

Open it tonight. One page. Then come back tomorrow, and the day after that.

Quran 96:3-5

Read, and your Lord is the most Generous.

By Mike Rashid King • Allah's Humble Servant