Before Islam decayed into inertia it had experienced a fierce and flaming life.  The impulse bestowed upon it by its founder operated chiefly in the religious world, and indirectly in the realm of political and military power.  How far the religion of Islam is indebted to Mahomet’s knowledge of the Jewish and Christian systems becomes clear upon a study of the Kuran and the Muslim institutions.  That Mahomet was familiar with Jewish Scriptures and tradition is beyond doubt.

The middle portion of the Kuran is filled to the point of weariness with reiterations of Jewish legend and hero-myths.  It is evident that Mahomet took the God of the Jews to be his own deity, combining in his conception also the traditional connection of Jehovah and His Chosen People with the ancient faith and ceremonies of Mecca, purged of their idolatries.  From the Jews he took his belief in the might and terror of the Lord and the admonitory character of his mission.  From them also he took the separatist nature of his creed.  The Jewish teachers postulated a religion distinct from every other belief, self-sufficient, owning no interpreter save the Law and the Scriptures.  Mahomet conceived himself also as the sole vehicle during his lifetime and after his death for the commands of the Most High.  He aimed at the superseding of Rabbinical power, and hoped to win the Jews into recognition of himself as successor to their own teachers and prophets.

But his claims were met by an unyielding reliance upon the completed Law.  If the Jewish religion had rejected a Redeemer from among its own people, it was impossible that it should accept a leader from an alien and despised race.  Mahomet, finding coalition impossible, gave free play to his separatist instinct, so that in this respect, and also in its fundamental conception of the deity, as well as in its reliance upon inspired Scriptures and oral traditions, Mahomedanism approximates to the Jewish system.  It misses the influence of an immemorial history, and receives no help in its campaign of warfare from the traditional glories of long lines of warrior kings.  Chief of all, it lacks the inspiration of the matchless Jewish Scriptures and Sacred Books, depending for instruction upon a document confined to the revelation of one man’s personality and view of life.

Still the narrowness of the Mahomedan system provoked its power; its rapid rush to the heights Of dominion was born of the straitening of its impulse into the channel of conquest and the forcible imposition of its faith.

Of Christianity Mahomet knew far less than of Judaism.  He went to the Christian doctrines as they were known in heterodox Syria, far off from the main stream of Christian life and teaching.  He went to them with a prejudiced mind, full of anger against their exponents for declaring the Messiah to be the Son of God.  The whole idea of the Incarnation and the dogma of the Trinity were thoroughly abhorrent to him, and the