Teaching · a Light

The measure given was learning it and passing it on

Uthman ibn Affan reported the Prophet ﷺ saying that the best of you are those who learn the Qur'an and teach it. The sentence is short and its shape is the point: not the one who learns it, and not the one who teaches it, but the one who does both. It became the charter for an institution found in every Muslim town, the kuttab or maktab where children learn to recite before they learn to read. Teachers in that system are often unpaid or barely paid, and the chain of transmission runs through them. A body of knowledge that could have stayed with specialists was made everybody's business by a sentence with two verbs in it.

Reported by Uthman ibn Affan

Source · Sahih al-Bukhari 5027