Islamic civilization has had an intimate relationship with writing from its very origins. Although Muslim tradition holds that the angel Jibra’il (Gabriel) orally revealed the Qurʾan to Muhammad in the early 7th century, and orality and oral transmission remained central features of Islamic civilization, the first verses revealed to the Prophet are said to have been “Recite, recite in the name of thy Lord, Who . . . taught man by the pen what he knew not” (Q. 96). Within the Prophet’s lifetime, individual verses or groups of verses were transcribed onto whatever media were available—ranging from flat bones to sheets of leather and papyrus—and soon after Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslim tradition records that his successors had all the revelations transcribed onto parchment sheets for preservation—the first manuscripts of the Qurʾan. By the 10th century, Muslim libraries from Iran to Spain contained thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of books, made possible by the ready availability and relative affordability of paper, which Muslims had encountered in Central Asia. The use of paper encouraged the development of new styles of calligraphy as well as new types of bookbindings. Christians in Spain and Italy eventually learned about paper from Muslims, and they began making it themselves in the 12th and 13th centuries, and the availability of paper in 15th-century Germany was undoubtedly one of the factors in the ultimate success of Gutenberg’s print revolution.