Not everything written is a text. A text is something a tradition decided was worth reading closely, more than once.
Treating something as “a text” — rather than just words on a page — is itself a decision. It means committing to read it more than once, cross-reference it against itself, and assume apparent contradictions are resolvable rather than just sloppy writing. Scrolling content gets read once and discarded. A text, in this stronger sense, gets returned to.
Pre-modern literacy education makes this concrete: it was built almost entirely around a small number of canonical texts read verse-by-verse, not a broad diet of casual reading. Classical tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) developed a formal hierarchy of sources for settling what a passage means — the text’s own self-explanation first, then the Prophet’s explanations, then his companions’ interpretations, then their successors’, then a scholar’s own reasoned judgment (ijtihad) only as a last resort — and proceeded through scripture word by word rather than skimming for gist. The same close-reading discipline shows up, differently sourced, in classical biblical exegesis and in the philological training built around canonical Greek and Latin texts.
Source: Sookhdeo, P. (2006). “Issues of Interpreting the Koran and Hadith.” Connections, 5(3).