A discussion held in the wake of Stephen Shoemaker's book Creating the Quran, which on pages 120-128 in which Shoemaker relies heavily on Michael Macdonald's 2010 article "Ancient Arabia and the written word".
I (Marijn van Putten) recently argued that in my 2023 article "The Development of the Hijazi Orthography" that Shoemaker had significantly misunderstood and misrepresented Macdonald's point.
This drew the ire of Shoemaker, who in his latest book The Quest of the Historical Muhammad wrote a rather acerbic reply to my comment in footnote 181, suggesting I had completely misunderstood Macdonald:
"181. Macdonald, "Uses of Writing in Ancient Arabia," 8-9. In a recent article Marijn van Putten rejects this consensus, although without any basis. In doing so, he also significantly misrepresents the content of Macdonald's "Ancient Arabian and the Written Word," wrongly maintaining that in the article Macdonald does not discuss literacy in western Arabia but only in regard to "Nomadic writers in the South Arabian scripts [MvP: this should have read South Semitic scripts, my fault]: van Putten "Development of the Hijazi Orthography 126n70. It is unfortunate to have to point this out, but I honestly do not see how any reasonable person could come to this conclusion after having read the article in question: perhaps he has in mind something else entirely? To the contrary, one need only glance at the last sentences of the article's abstract, which summarize the portion of the article that covers late antiquity: "In late antiquity, the Nabataean Aramaic script gradually ceased to be employed to write Aramaic and come to be used for Arabic, which thus at last came to be a habitually written language. However, writing appears to have been used only for notes, business documents, treaties, letters, etc., not for culturally important texts [i.e., religious texts, the Qur'an], which continued to be passed on orally well into the early Islamic period." Macdonald, "Ancient Arabia and the Written Word," 5. In any case, readers interested in this matter would do well to read Macdonald's article for themselves before trusting van Putten's inaccurate summary of its conclusions. Lindstedt too has recently pretested against the reigning consensus that the cultures of Mecca and Yathrib were nonliterate in Muhammad's lifetime, insisting instead that they were just as literate as anywhere else in the late ancient Near East, although offering only his own authority for this judgment: Lindstedt, Muḥammad and His Followers, 22."
Knowing Macdonald quite well, and knowing the modern analogy he draws with Tuareg quite well, I was sure that Shoemaker was certainly misapplying Macdonald's words. Ahmad Al-Jallad suggested he'd have a conversation on the topic with Michael and see what he thinks about Shoemaker's characterization of his article. The following recording is the outcome of this conversation (published with their consent).
I hope this conversation is of more general interest than the just 'refuting' Shoemaker's characterization.
Sources:
Macdonald 2010. "Ancient Arabia and the written word"
https://www.academia.edu/4421409/Ancient_Arabia_and_the_written_word
Shoemaker 2022. Creating the Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study. https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.128
Van Putten 2023 "The Development of the Hijazi Orthography" https://doi.org/10.1515/mill-2023-0007
Shoemaker 2024 The Quest of the Historical Muhammad and Other Studies on Formative Islam
https://wipfandstock.com/9798385220380/the-quest-of-the-historical-muhammad-and-other-studies-on-formative-islam/