Issaka Sannie is a governance analyst, public health practitioner, and author
The First Word From Allah Was ‘Read’:
What Islam’s Opening Command Demands of Mankind.
Fourteen centuries ago, one word launched a civilisation. Iqra. Read. As Ramadan begins, that single command still carries more transformative power than any national development plan that ignores it.
Quranic Foundation:
‘Read! In the name of your Lord who created.’ (Surah Al-‘Alaq, 96:1)
When Allah chose the first word to reveal to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, He did not say ‘worship’ or ‘obey’ or even ‘believe’. He said: Read. Iqra. This choice carries a weight that the centuries have not diminished.
The first divine command to humanity was an instruction to engage the mind, to pursue knowledge as an act of devotion, to refuse ignorance as a form of submission to God.
The philosopher Francis Bacon declared that knowledge is power. Islam frames this more precisely: knowledge is purpose. This is profoundly instrumental and its benefit supersedes determination. The psychologist Viktor Frankl asserts that meaning-seeking is the primary human drive.
To him, a person deprived of purpose deteriorates. What the Quran establishes in this opening verse is that knowledge, pursued in the name of the Creator, is the most direct path to that meaning. Reading is not an intellectual luxury; it is a spiritual obligation.
Ghana, our beloved nation, embodies a scenario where this verse illuminates with particular clarity. The Health Ministry’s recent establishment of an independent committee to investigate the death of Charles Amissah, chaired by the respected pathologist Agyeman Badu Akosa, reflects something the Quran understood long before modern governance theory: accountability requires knowledge.
Without rigorous inquiry, without reading the evidence carefully and following it wherever it leads, justice cannot be served, confidence cannot be restored, and healthcare systems cannot improve. President Mahama’s government does well to insist on this inquiry. The Quranic imperative supports it: you cannot govern what you refuse to examine.
The connection between knowledge and national development may seem metaphorical, but it is not; it is structural. Countries that have pulled themselves from poverty and instability into prosperity, like Singapore, South Korea, and Rwanda, have all done so by treating knowledge infrastructure as the foundation of every other kind of infrastructure.
Roads are built by engineers. Hospitals are run by clinicians. Institutions are sustained by literate, critically thinking citizens with competence. Ghana’s aspirations for economic transformation, for reducing import dependency, for building domestic industry, rest entirely on a population that reads, thinks, and applies knowledge with discipline.
At the global level, the OECD’s Digital Education Outlook 2026, released in January of this year, makes an argument that is, at its core, Quranic. The report warns that generative artificial intelligence should be used selectively and purposefully in education, never to replace cognitive effort.
In other words, the world’s leading educational policy body is telling governments what Allah communicated to the Prophet in a cave above Mecca: the act of reading itself, the engagement of the human intellect directly with knowledge, is irreplaceable. Technology may assist; it cannot substitute. Faith, reason, and the best available science arrive at the same conclusion.
Ramadan is the month in which the Holy Quran was revealed. This series of daily reflections uses that original context to ask what continuous improvement in human life actually requires. The answer, on this first day, is straightforward.
It requires reading. It requires inquiry. It requires that we refuse to govern what we have not examined, that we refuse to treat what we have not studied, and that we refuse to lead what we have not first sought to understand.
Ghana deserves leadership grounded in knowledge. Humanity deserves the same. Faith, on this evidence, enriches the path to that standard. Properly understood, it is the oldest argument for it.
Source:
www.ghanaweb.com
