1. oral and the written during the Jahiliyyah and early Islam -- 2. Qur'an and Qur'an 'readers' (qurra) -- 3. beginnings of religious scholarship in Islam : sirah, hadith, tafsir -- 4. Literature and the caliphal court -- 5. turn toward systematisation : the tasnif movement -- 6. birth of linguistics and philology -- 7. Books and their readership in the ninth century -- 8. Listening to books, or reading them? -- Concluding remarks. From the aural to the read.