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ISLAM
Like other tribal peoples, people of the Arabian desert had been polytheistic. They believed in spirits that were neutral to them, spirits that were hostile and spirits to which they could appeal. They believed that through ritual they could bind themselves as a tribe to a spirit. And they saw spirits in various objects and places. They saw spirit in the moon and stars, in the rocks which marked their way through the desert, in springs and water wells, in caves, in the few trees in the region and on mountain tops - places they considered holy.
When Arabic tribes came together at markets and fairs they engaged in religious ceremony and held a truce. At these fairs the tribes acquired a common view of a god they called Allah, a god who was one among the other gods. These contacts among the Arabs reinforced their common language, which was rich in poetry, and they acquired a common identity as Arabs.
Into this Arabic world had come cultural influences from elsewhere. In Arabia were the descendants of Jewish refugees from centuries before. By the year 500, Christian missionaries had arrived in Arabia. Before the rise of Islam, the entire Arabian province of Najran had been Christian. Christianity was established superficially in various other centers of trade, and Arabs living on the borders of what was left of the Roman and Persian empires had contacts with people and ideas from those empires.
The founder of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, had been familiar with Christianity through his wife's cousin, who was a Christian. Muhammad was familiar with the New Testament of the Christians and the Old Testament of the Jews, and with Zoroastrianism. And in his travels as a merchant he had become familiar with Arabia's Hanif movement, which was neither Jewish nor Christian but had discarded the worship of idols and traditional polytheistic religion.
The earliest biography on the Prophet Muhmmad of which scholars are aware dates to 767, 135 years after his death, and that is known to scholars through a later edition, compiled in 833. Muhammad is described as occasionally withdrawing to meditate in a cave outside of his hometown, Mecca -- similar to the withdrawal of some Christian ascetics in Syria. In the cave outside Mecca, Muhammad, at around forty years of age, began hearing messages from God via the angel Gabriel. Muhammad decided that the god he knew as Allah was also Jehovah, the god of the Jews and Christians. He claimed to foresee the end of the world, a day of judgment, when the dead would be awakened, when all would be judged according to their deeds and sent to either paradise or eternal flames..
Muhammad saw his faith as monotheistic, like that of the Hanif, Christians and Jews. And like the Christians he saw the world between God and humanity as occupied by angels and demons. He saw the future as in the hands of God, and he felt it was his duty to convert people to what he called "submission to the will of God" and to warn his fellow Meccans of God's Final Judgment. In modern times, Muslim scholars were not to describe Islam as a product of cultural diffusion or as a historical development. Instead, it was viewed as an intervention in human history by God. And this had to be the Prophet Muhammad's view. He proclaimed that God had chosen him to preach the truth, that he was God's final and foremost messenger, superseding the message proclaimed by Jesus
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Copyright © 2007 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.