To understand what Muhammad was doing in creating a new religion, it would be necessary to know what religious resources were available to him, and in what form. In a sense, of course, we know perfectly well; we possess rich literary remains from Jewish and Christian traditions, and we know something about the paganism of Arabia. But beyond this point the going gets difficult. We might like to think of Muhammad as a well-travelled merchant acquainted with the same forms of the monotheist tradition as are familiar to us. Or we might think of him as a man of more local horizons who was in contact with some Arabian byways of monotheism which have otherwise left no trace. The first view makes him a man of considerable doctrinal originality, whereas on the second view he might have found much that to us is distinctively Islamic already present in his Arabian environment. The trouble is that we are not well-placed to decide between two such hypotheses. For example, we would dearly like to know what sort of Judaism was current in pre-Islamic western Arabia; but evidence of this is scarce within the Islamic tradition, and non-existent outside it. For the most part, we are reduced to the crude procedure of comparing Islam with the mainstream traditions of Judaism and Christianity, and trying to determine which elements came from which. The answers are often convincing, but they fail to tell us in what form these elements came to Muhammad, or he to them.
Casalino Pierluigi, on June, 4th 2014
Casalino Pierluigi, on June, 4th 2014