time Jewish ideas may have been in circulation, not only in the Qoran but also in oral tradition, which afterwards became stereotyped:  at the same time Muhammed’s utterances against the Jews eventually became so strong during the Medina period, for political reasons, that I can hardly imagine the traditions in their final form to have been adopted directly from the Jews.  The case of Jewish converts is a different matter.  But in Christianity also much Jewish wisdom was to be found at that time and it is well known that even the Eastern churches regarded numerous precepts of the Old Testament, including those that dealt with ritual, as binding upon them.  In any case the spirit of Judaism is present, either directly or working through Christianity, as an influence wherever Islam accommodated itself to the new intellectual and spiritual life which it had encountered.  It was a compromise which affected the most trivial details of life, and in these matters religious scrupulosity was carried to a ridiculous point:  here we may see the outcome of that Judaism which, as has been said, was then a definite element in Eastern Christianity.  Together with Jewish, Greek and classical ideas were also naturally operative, while Persian and other ancient Oriental conceptions were transmitted to Islam by Christianity:  these instances I have collectively termed Christian because Christianity then represented the whole of later classical intellectualism, which influenced Islam for the most part through Christianity.

It seems that the communication of these ideas to Muhammedanism was impeded by the necessity of translating them not only into a kindred language, but into one of wholly different linguistic structure.  For Muhammedanism the difficulty was lessened by the fact that it had learned Christianity in Syria and Persia through the Semitic dialect known as Aramaic, by which Greek and Persian culture had been transmitted to the Arabs before the rise of Islam.  In this case, as in many others, the history of language runs on parallel lines with the history of civilisation.  The necessities of increasing civilisation had introduced many Aramaic words to the Arabic vocabulary before Muhammed’s day:  these importations increased considerably when the Arabs entered a wider and more complex civilisation and were especially considerable where intellectual culture was concerned.  Even Greek terms made their way into Arabic through Aramaic.  This natural dependency of Arabic upon Aramaic, which in turn was connected with Greek as the rival Christian vernacular in these regions, is alone sufficient evidence that Christianity exerted a direct influence upon Muhammedanism.  Moreover, as we have seen, the Qoran itself regarded Christians as being in possession of divine wisdom, and some reference both to Christianity and to Judaism was necessary to explain the many unintelligible passages of the Qoran.  Allusions were made to texts and statements in the Thora and the Gospels,