Oral transmission offered superior authenticity and moral accountability over texts

Evidence

In a complex oral culture, as Islam was, orality constituted the measure of ethical formation in the transmission of knowledge, legal or otherwise, which is to say that the spoken or transmitted word held a force of authenticity that a text could not ensure. A text can always be forged, and the culprit is not always guaranteed to be caught, but oral knowledge transmitted directly from one person to another made the source and every link in the transmission identifiable and knowable, with all the attendant moral and ethical accountability this made possible. Orality, in other words, meant a particular technology of knowledge that shaped its human operators—by virtue of its own content, teleology, and modes of operation—into ethical subjects. Orality qua orality was then performative, not just a “way” of transmitting information. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 267

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard hierarchy that written texts are superior to oral transmission: orality’s identifiable chain of custody made it more authentic and morally constituted its practitioners as ethical subjects.
• XREF: Echoes themes from the reader’s work on reputation chains in extralegal diamond trading and the law merchant — verifiable provenance and personal accountability substituting for impersonal written guarantees.