In a cave outside Mecca, some time around 610, a middle-aged merchant on a retreat is seized by a presence he will later identify as the angel Jibril.
He is pressed until he cannot breathe, and given a command.
Iqra. Read.
The man answers: Ma ana bi-qari. I am not a reader. I cannot read.
The command comes again. Read. Again he says he cannot. A third time, and then the sentence completes: Read, in the name of your Lord who created.
Consider what the first word could have been.
Obey would have been conventional. Submit, believe, worship, fear, follow. Every one of those is a normal opening for a revelation, and every one establishes a relationship of authority in which the appropriate posture is deference.
The word was read.
And it was given to a man who could not, in a society that was overwhelmingly oral, whose greatest cultural achievement was poetry held in memory and recited, where literacy was a specialist trade practised by a minority of merchants for keeping accounts.
The command was not a description of what he could do. It was an instruction about what the thing being founded was going to be.
Within a generation the revelation was being collected and fixed in writing, with an apparatus for verifying the text that has few parallels anywhere. Within two, a science of transmission existed to assess not just what had been said but who had heard it from whom, whether that person's memory was reliable, whether the chain contained a gap. Within three centuries the Islamic world was running the largest translation programme in human history and the biggest libraries on earth.
None of that is coincidence, and none of it is only the by-product of wealth. Plenty of wealthy empires in this book built no libraries.
The difference is that a civilisation whose founding command is read has a permanent theological reason to care about text, literacy, verification and transmission. Learning is not a luxury the rich can afford once the fighting stops. It is the first thing that was asked for.
I want to be careful about what I am claiming, because there is a triumphalist version of this argument and it is not the one I am making.
The Islamic world did not produce four centuries of extraordinary science because Muslims are cleverer. It produced them because a set of conditions held: a theological warrant for inquiry, institutions willing to fund it, a translation infrastructure, a common scholarly language across a huge territory, and rulers who found patronage useful.
The warrant on its own guarantees nothing. It just makes the case much easier to argue when somebody has to decide what to pay for.
Most civilisations arrived at the value of learning through prosperity, or through contact with someone who already had it, or through a court that found scholars ornamental.
This one began with an unlettered man in a cave being told to read, and saying he could not, and being told again.