Imam Sadiq (peace be upon him): In the book Nur al-Thaqalayn it is narrated from Imam Sadiq (peace be upon him) [...] O Mufaddal! Reflect on what a great blessing Allah has given to man, namely speech and utterance, so that whatever is in his heart and whatever passes through his mind and comes to his thought he may bring onto his tongue and make another understand what is in his heart. And if he were not speaking and were like the tongueless animals which cannot say anything of themselves and understand nothing from an informer — and likewise is the blessing of writing, which records the reports of the past for those who remain, and writes the reports of those who remain for those who will come, and through it the books of the sciences and arts (adab) and other things become everlasting, and man preserves and records the agreements between himself and others in transactions and accounts. And if writing did not exist, the ages would be cut off from one another, and no one would have any news of travellers, and the sciences would perish and the arts (adab) would be lost, and a great disruption would come upon people in their affairs and transactions and religious needs, and the narrations concerning religion which they must know would be lost, and those that were narrated would not remove their ignorance and lack of knowledge. Perhaps you will think that man has attained writing by his own cunning and intelligence, and that it was not given to him by creation and nature; and likewise that speech is a convention among the people themselves and their own achievement, and that this is why every nation has its own particular language and its own particular script — Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, Roman, and other scripts and languages scattered among the nations, upon which they have agreed just as they agreed upon their own language among themselves. So to the one who makes such a claim it must be said: although man has some action or contrivance in these two crafts, nevertheless that thing which enables him to reach that action and contrivance is a gift and grant of Allah, the Mighty and Majestic, who placed this intelligence in his creation. For if he did not have a tongue prepared for speech and a mind that guides him to affairs, he could never speak, and if he did not have a hand and fingers capable of writing, he could never write. Let him take a lesson from the animals, which neither know speech nor can write. So the origin of it is the nature given by Allah, the Mighty and Majestic, and what He has bestowed as favour upon His creation; and whoever gives thanks is rewarded, and whoever is ungrateful — indeed Allah is free of need from the worlds.