Literacy in Early Islam

As all of my readers know, I like reading the writings of the Saints.  That’s not too big a shock seeing as how I’m Catholic.  I also like to study Church history.  I recently acquired The Chronicle of Theophanes.  It contains history from 602 to 813 AD.

St. Theophanes was a monk in Constantinople who lived from 760 to 817 AD.  He’s considered a saint in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches.  His chronicle is one of the major sources on the rise of Islam and also the Byzantine-Persian War that preceded it.  It was really interesting reading about war; everyone who studies Islam knows about it, but few have studied it in depth.  I admit that before reading this work I didn’t know much about it.  It was a very educational read.

It’s known that the Arabs were an oral culture when they left Arabia to attack the Byzantine and Persian Empires.  This doesn’t mean that none of them could read or write but literacy was extremely low.  Now, this doesn’t mean that they weren’t advanced.  In 636 AD the Arabs beat a Roman army at Yarmouk.  One wouldn’t be able to accomplish this feat without careful and precise military expertise.  The Arabs who emerged from Arabia were a very advanced people.

Now, the Byzantines were a highly literate culture.  The Persians weren’t too literate as well though more so than the Arabs.  Western scholars look at Islamic documents from the early Islamic period and not much exists before the ninth century.  The latter half of the ninth century is when the major hadith collections come into existence.  The history of Al-Tabari comes in the early tenth century.  What’s interesting to point out is that these scholars and their writers come from the Abbasid Caliphate as opposed to the Umayyad.

The revisionist Dan Gibson for the most part puts all of his eggs in one basket and says that the Abbasids rewrote the history of Islam.  Although I don’t subscribe to Gibson’s theory on Islamic origins, it’s true that the Abbasids had a virtual monopoly on the history of early Islam via the Hadith Collections and Al-Tabari.

Getting back to Theophanes, he doesn’t record what happened in Arabia with Islam, but he talks about the conquests of the Roman and Persian Empires.  The Umayyads set up in Damascus.  When did they become literate?  Theophanes gives us two interesting passages.

In the entry for September 1, 707 to August 31, 708 we read:

In this year Walid robbed the holy Catholic Church of Damascus out of the envy the sinner felt toward the Christians because of this church’s surpassing beauty.  He also stopped the use of Greek in the public record books of the departments ordering them to be written in Arabic instead: that is, except for numbers, since it is impossible to write the number “one,” the number “two,” the number “three,” “eight and a half,” or “three in the feminine gender” in their language.  Because of this their scribes are Christians even to the present day.

This chronicle goes to the ninth century, specifically 813 AD.  This goes to show that even in a city as prominent as Damascus, Christian scribes were used, even when Arabic was the official language.  It’s a bit ironic that even in the early 9th century, Christians were better at Arabic than the Muslims were.

In the entry for September 1, 759 to August 31, 760 we read:

In this year the Arabs, out of envy of the Christians, for a short time prevented them from being public scribes.  However, they once more had to use the Christians for these matters because of their own inability to record the decisions.

It’s an interesting scenario.  As we know, Muslims are big into orally reciting the Quran and memorizing it.  It’s popular today and it was even more popular back then.  If the Muslims in Damascus were illiterate, it’s safe to assume that it was like that all over the Islamic world.

Now, we know that Muslims would have learned to read Arabic before they learned to read Greek or Latin.  Because of this, they wouldn’t have had a chance to read the Christians scriptures.  To my knowledge, Muslim polemicists didn’t read the Christian scriptures until the late 9th and early 10th centuries, mainly in Spain.  When they realized that the Bible didn’t support the Quran and it just wasn’t Christians and Jews dropping the ball in their interpretation, they had two choices.  They could say that Islam is false or that the Bible is corrupted.  At this point Islam was a political system that couldn’t be overthrown.  The fix was in.  The myth of the corrupted Bible was born.