as recorded in the Sahīh from ʿIyād ibn Himār al-Mujāshiʿī, who reported that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:
“When I created My servants, I created them upright in faith”—and later in the same hadith—“I shall test you and test others through you. I have sent down to you a Book that water cannot wash away, which you recite asleep and awake.”
Our community is therefore unlike the People of the Book, who do not preserve their scriptures in their hearts. Even if every written copy of the Quran were lost, the Quran would remain preserved in the hearts of this community. In this respect, the Muslims remain an unlettered community even after the Quran’s revelation and their memorization of it.
As recorded in the Sahīh from Ibn ʿUmar, may Allah Most High be pleased with them both, the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:
“We are an unlettered community: we neither calculate nor write. The month is like this and like this.”
He did not say, “We neither read a book nor memorize.” Rather, he said, “We neither write nor calculate.” Our religion therefore does not require writing and calculation, unlike the practice of the People of the Book, who determine the times for their fasting and its ending through written records and calculation. Their religion depends on books: if these were lost, they would not know their religion. This is why most adherents of the Sunnah are found to memorize the Quran and hadith to a greater extent than the people of innovation. The people of innovation resemble the People of the Book in certain respects.
As for His words:
“So believe in Allah and His Messenger, the unlettered Prophet,”
he is unlettered in this respect: he neither writes nor reads what is in books—not in the sense that he cannot recite from memory. Indeed, he had memorized the Quran with the utmost mastery. In the terminology of the jurists, an ummī (unlettered person) is the opposite of a reciter, not the opposite of someone who writes, as in the first sense; and by it they mean