believe was one ɹnal attempt to make his wishes known.
But even this came laden with ambiguity.
“Bring me writing materials that I may write
something for you, after which you will not be led into
error,” he said.
It seems a simple enough request and a perfectly
reasonable one under the circumstances, but it produced
near panic among those in the room at the time: the
wives, Omar, and Abu Bakr. Nobody there knew what it
was Muhammad wanted to write—or rather, as tradition
has it, to dictate to a scribe, since one of the basic tenets
of Islam is that he could neither read nor write, however
improbable that may have been in a man who was for
many years a merchant trader. That would have
required that he keep records of what was bought and
sold, and though this was no great literary art, it did
require the basic skills of literacy. But Muhammad’s
assumed illiteracy acted as a kind of guarantee that the
Quran had been revealed, not invented, that it was truly
the word of the divine, not the result of human
authorship.
Whether the dying Prophet wanted to write or to
dictate, though, the question now on everyone’s mind
was the same: What would it be? General guidelines for
how they should proceed? Religious advice to the
community he was about to leave behind? Or the one
possibility that seemed most called for and yet was most