Medieval annotators grasped the Qur’an’s polyphonic shifts of speaker and the illiteracy argument

Evidence

Readers of this Book should note that God Himself, so Muhammad pretended, wrote this Law with His own hand and delivered it to the aforementioned Prophet to preach to the world. He said that he had never been able to read, or to know letters, lest it should have been thought to have been composed by him. In spite of this, in speaking he assumed a variety of persons; now indeed he speaks in the person of God, now of the Prophet, now of good people invoking God and giving thanks to Him, and even, occasionally, of those who upbraid the good people: all according to the difference of places. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 226

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader study of how early Western polemicists read the Qur’an — close kin to the modern scholarly attention (Reynolds, ‘Qur’an and Its Biblical Subtext’) given to the Qur’an’s internal speaker shifts and the ummi prophet motif.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: was the ‘variety of persons’ observation (God speaking directly vs. the Prophet) original to this medieval annotator, or did it follow an earlier Christian or Muslim grammatical tradition like al-Zamakhshari?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 226