Although he always had a pioneering role in any activity.

Although he always had a pioneering role in any activity." This is, again, a strange reasoning. The initial verses of the above-mentioned s6rah indicate, of course, that these were revealed to a servant of Allah (SWT), who was in charge of guiding Allah's other servants, and that the Prophet (SA), who received them at his holy heart, acknowledged the value of reading and writing for men.

But these verses never suggest that either Allah (SWT) or the Prophet (SA) dealt with reading, writing, pen or paper. Dr `Abd al-Latif also says: "The Holy Prophet was the initiator in practising all that he himself ordered. How could he then order this without doing it himself?" It is, as if to say that a physician who prescribes a medicine for a patient, should first use the medicine himself.

Of course, if the physician falls sick and is in need of the same type of medicine, he will definitely take it just as his patient does. But how about the reverse - when the physician isn't sick and consequently not in need of such a medicine?

Here we should see whether the Holy Prophet, like others who were in need of learning the arts of reading and writing in order to attain perfection and to remove their defects, had to acquire these two arts and yet, didn't act upon what he himself ordered, or was he in a state that rendered him independent of them. The Holy Prophet was the forerunner in matters of worship, devotion, piety, honesty, truth, good-temperedness, democracy, humility and other good manners.

For all of these were counted towards his perfection and the lack of these was a defect. But the issue of so-called `literacy' doesn't belong to this category. The unusual value of being literate for human beings is because the literacy helps them benefit from one another's knowledge. Writing is essentially the conventional symbols used by people to express themselves.

In fact through the familiarity with writing, knowledge can be transmitted from one person to another, from one tribe to another and from one generation to another. Thus, man preserves his knowledge from extinction. This is why being literate is considered equal to knowing languages, i.e, the more number of languages the man knows, the more means he has at his disposal to acquire knowledge from others.

Both knowing languages and being literate are keys to the acquisition of knowledge rather than the "knowledge" in its real sense.