Mount Hira '

But Muhammad was inconsolable, so Khadija took him to the only person she could think might be able to verify the nature of what had happened, her cousin Waraqa. Waraqa, an Ebionite Christian, had been one of the founding four Hanifs. He recognized Muhammad's experience for what it was: "If this be true, Khadija, there has come to him the great divinity who came to Moses aforetime, and lo, he is the Prophet of this people," says Karen Armstrong in Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time. Waraqa told Muhammad that he would be persecuted and that he should "see his life as one of deliberate preparation rather than random fate." He pointed out that "all the brokenness in his past had actually prepared him to unleash his potential as a world changer."

Some scholars doubt that Muhammad would have been the successful businessman he was, had he been unable to read and write the correspondence and documentation relating to his own business. He may have been able to read both Arabic and the Aramaic in common use by the Jewish community at the time. They suggest that the epithet the Qur'an uses for Muhammad: "an-nabi al-ummi" traditionally meaning "the unlettered Prophet," might instead mean "The Prophet for the unlettered," in other words, for the people without a holy book. "We did not give [the Arabs] any previous books to study, nor sent them any previous Warners before you." (The Qur'an 34:44).

The revelations that Muhammad received were conveyed to others in words remote from his world: he was not known to have composed any poetry and had no special rhetorical gifts. From the first revelation, the Suras (chapters) of the Qur'an would deal with matters of belief, law, politics, ritual, spirituality and personal conduct, cosmology, and economics in what Karen Armstrong describes as an "entirely new literary form." The Qur'an itself states, "If you are in doubt of what We have revealed to Our messenger, then produce one chapter like it. Call upon all your helpers, besides God, if you are truthful." (The Qur'an 2.23) No one was able to do this.