Read!

The angel came to him in the cave and said: Read. He ﷺ answered: I am not one who reads. Then, he related, the angel seized him and pressed him until the strain reached its limit, released him, and said again: Read. I am not one who reads. A second time the angel pressed him until he had no strength left, released him: Read. And a third time he was seized and pressed, and then released, and this time the angel spoke the words that opened the final revelation:

Read in the name of your Lord who created. Created man from a clinging substance. Read, and your Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he did not know.

He ﷺ repeated them, and they settled into his heart like fire and light at once. He came down the mountain trembling, his heart pounding, and reached home to Khadijah (ra) with the words: cover me, cover me. She wrapped him until the terror left him, and he told her what had happened: I feared for myself.

Her answer deserves to be carved wherever loyalty is honoured. Never, she said; by Allah, Allah will never disgrace you. You keep the ties of kinship, you carry the burdens of the weak, you earn for the destitute, you honour the guest, and you stand by every just cause. A heart that true could not, she reasoned, be abandoned by its Maker.

The first revealed words of a scripture that would fill the earth were not march or conquer. They were Read, in the name of a Lord who teaches. A community that had hardly any writers had just been founded on the pen.