Five Words Addressed to a Prophet Already Taught

The instruction, my Lord, increase me in knowledge, appears in the twentieth surah, Ta-Ha, addressed by God to Muhammad as the words he is told to say, making it unusual among the Quran's embedded prayers for being explicitly commanded speech directed at the Prophet himself rather than a petition placed in the mouth of an earlier prophet such as Moses or Abraham. Islamic scholarship has long drawn attention to the theological weight of this instruction: if the recipient of ongoing revelation is himself commanded to keep asking for more knowledge, commentators argue, this establishes as a matter of scriptural precedent that the pursuit of knowledge has no natural stopping point, even for someone already regarded as uniquely favored with divine communication.

The verse's brevity, five words in Arabic, has made it one of the most quoted single lines from the Quran in contexts concerning education and scholarship, cited far more often as a general principle than recited as part of formal ritual prayer, since it carries no fixed liturgical role comparable to Al-Fatiha. Its placement within a surah otherwise concerned substantially with the narrative of Moses has led some commentators to read it as a kind of pause or aside within the chapter, a general statement of principle inserted amid an extended prophetic narrative rather than arising directly from the story around it.