"Islam in Muslim reflection is the religion of the pen.

Muslims a people of the pen. It is significant that the inaugural revelation in Sura 96 (v. 4) already makes a reference to this. The act of reading is the primal act of faith: 'Read!' demands the Angel at Hira. And Sura 68 takes it title from a reference to the pen (qalam), seen in the koranic world as the primary symbol of the divine tuition of mankind through the essentially literary institutions of messengership and scripture. For Muslims, the Koran remains the supreme achievement of the divine pen; Islam prides itself on being an intellectual faith par excellence which takes its basic definition from the unique literary miracle of the Arabic Koran. Throughout the history of Islam, the initial koranic emphasis on literacy and scholarship has been transparent in the ardent Muslim desire for seeking knowledge - and all as part of a paradigmatically religious obligation. There have been also the auxiliary arts of the pen - calligraphy most notably - in which much Muslim ambition has been invested.

-The Final Imperative: An Islamic Theology of Liberation, pg. 78