This is clear from the writings on Hadith, one of the first genres to be committed to paper. As in any culture, Muslims started writing as an aid for their memory. This flies in the face of the oft-repeated idea that the Islamic civilization was firstly an oral culture. “Life withers but writing remains,” wrote master-calligrapher Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān al-Warrāq in the eleventh century, as he finished another copy of the Koran. It has been said that “in spite of all the real and affected reverence paid to memorized knowledge, Muslim civilization, as much as any higher civilization, was a civilization of the written word.” As such, the civilization of Islam has been called “one of the most bookish of pre-modern cultures.” And it is not just modern scholars who think so. It appeared last year in Turkish, in Sabah Ülkesi vol. A small article on why manuscripts kept being popular in the Islamic world until very late.
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