"The first letter is not a letter at all in the beginning. It is the sound of thought beginning to become speech. It is the threshold between silence and meaning."

When we think of an alphabet, we think of learning to read. But for the great Islamic philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi (872–950 CE), letters were not just tools for literacy—they were the very building blocks of logic, metaphysics, and human understanding.

The alphabet, for Farabi, is the fossilized remains of ancient wisdom.