Reading
&
Writing

You know, when Muhammad first heard the words of the Qur�an he lived in a time and place where hardly anyone knew how to read and write.

So they were used to having to remember important things without having to write them down.

In fact, Muhammad himself could not read,

and when he heard his first word of the Qur'an, which was "Read", he was afraid, and said "I cannot read".

But God knew that he would still remember all the words of the Qur'an.

Muhammad was special, of course, but ordinary people can easily forget things and make mistakes.

So if you want to have some words remembered for a long time without mistakes, it is best to learn how to write them down and read them back again.

To share our knowledge and understanding of the world we need to let other people know the things that we have learned ourselves,

and Muhammad knew that if his people were to learn as much as they could they would need to learn to read and write.

The great thing about reading and writing is that you can share what you know with other people

even when they are in a far away place, or even a far away time.

And that makes it possible to know the exact words that Muhammad spoke when he was alive all those years ago,

because his friends not only learned his words but also wrote them down,

so we can still read them today.

In fact, all around the world you can find Muslim children being taught to read the Qur'an,

in schools, in mosques, and in their homes.

And if we are going to read and write, it is useful to first learn our letters.

Letters are the shapes we use to show the different sounds we make when we speak.

When we learn to read and write in English, we need to learn our alphabet,

all the letters we use to show the sounds that we make when we speak in English.

But Muhammad spoke a different language, called Arabic,

which uses sounds that we don't have letters for in English,

and has a very different looking alphabet.

The Arabic letters and their sounds