In the materialistic commercial town of Mecca, where lust of gain and usury reigned supreme, where women, wine, and gambling filled up the leisure time, where might was right, and widows, orphans, and the feeble were treated as superfluous ballast, an unfortunate being like Mohammed, if his constitution were sensitive, must have experienced most painful emotions. In the intellectual advantages that the place offered he could find no solace; the highly developed Arabian art of words, poetry with its fictitious amourettes, its polished descriptions of portions of Arabian nature, its venal vain praise and satire, might serve as dessert to a well-filled dish; they were unable to compensate for the lack of material prosperity. Mohammed felt his misery as a pain too great to be endured; in some way or other he must be delivered from it. He desired to be more than the greatest in his surroundings, and he knew that in that which they counted for happiness he could never even equal them. Rather than envy them regretfully, he preferred to despise their values of life, but on that very account he had to oppose these values with better ones.
It was not unknown in Mecca that elsewhere communities existed acquainted with such high ideals of life, spiritual goods accessible to the poor, even to them in particular. Apart from commerce, which brought the inhabitants of Mecca into contact with Abyssinians, Syrians, and others, there were far to the south and less far to the north and north-east of Mecca, Arabian tribes who had embraced the Jewish or the Christian religion. Perhaps this circumstance had helped to make the inhabitants of Mecca familiar with the idea of a creator, Allah, but this had little significance in their lives, as in the Maker of the Universe they did not see their Lawgiver and judge, but held themselves dependent for their good and evil fortune upon all manner of beings, which they rendered favourable or harmless by animistic practices. Thoroughly conservative, they did not take great interest in the conceptions of the "People of the Scripture," as they called the Jews, Christians, and perhaps some other sects arisen from these communities.
But Mohammed's deeply felt misery awakened his interest in them. Whether this had been the case with a few others before him in the milieu of Mecca, we need not consider, as it does not help to explain his actions. If wide circles had been anxious to know more about the contents of the "Scripture" Mohammed would not have felt in the dark in the way that he did. We shall probably never know, by intercourse with whom it really was that Mohammed at last gained some knowledge of the contents of the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity; probably through various people, and over a considerable length of time. It was not lettered men who satisfied his awakened curiosity; otherwise the quite confused ideas, especially in the beginning of the revelation, concerning the mutual relations between Jews and Christians could not be explained. Confusions between Miryam, the sister of Moses, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, between Saul and Gideon, mistakes about the relationship of Abraham to Isaac, Ishmael, and Jacob, might be put down to misconceptions of Mohammed himself, who could not all at once master the strange material. But his representation of Judaism and Christianity and a number of other forms of revelation, as almost identical in their contents, differing only in the place where, the time wherein, and the messenger of God by whom they came to man; this idea, which runs like a crimson thread through all the revelations of the first twelve years of Mohammed's prophecy, could not have existed if he had had an intimate acquaintance with Jewish or Christian men of letters. Moreover, the many post-biblical features and stories which the Qorân contains concerning the past of mankind, indicate a vulgar origin, and especially as regards the Christian legends, communications from people who lived outside the communion of the great Christian churches; this is sufficiently proved by the docetical representation of the death of Jesus and the many stories about his life, taken from apocryphal sources or from popular oral legends.
Mohammed's unlearned imagination worked all such material together into a religious history of mankind, in which Adam's descendants had become divided into innumerable groups of peoples differing in speech and place of abode, whose aim in life at one period or another came to resemble wonderfully that of the inhabitants of West- and Central-Arabia in the seventh century A.D. Hereby they strayed from the true path, in strife with the commands given by Allah. The whole of history, therefore, was for him a long series of repetitions of the antithesis between the foolishness of men, as this was now embodied in the social state of Mecca, and the wisdom of God, as known to the "People of the Scripture." To bring the erring ones back to the true path, it was Allah's plan to send them messengers from out of their midst, who delivered His ritual and His moral directions to them in His own words, who demanded the acknowledgment of Allah's omnipotence, and if they refused to follow the true guidance, threatened them with Allah's temporary or, even more, with His eternal punishment.
The antithesis is always the same, from Adam to Jesus, and the enumeration of the scenes is therefore rather monotonous; the only variety is in the detail, borrowed from biblical and apocryphal legends. In all the thousands of years the messengers of Allah play the same part as Mohammed finally saw himself called upon to play towards his people.
Mohammed's account of the past contains more elements of Jewish than of Christian origin, and he ignores the principal dogmas of the Christian Church. In spite of his supernatural birth, Jesus is only a prophet like Moses and others; and although his miracles surpass those of other messengers, Mohammed at a later period of his life is inclined to place Abraham above Jesus in certain respects. Yet the influence of Christianity upon Mohammed's vocation was very great; without the Christian idea of the final scene of human history, of the Resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment, Mohammed's mission would have no meaning. It is true, monotheism, in the Jewish sense, and after the contrast had become clear to Mohammed, accompanied by an express rejection of the Son of God and of the Trinity, has become one of the principal dogmas of Islâm. But in Mohammed's first preaching, the announcement of the Day of judgment is much more prominent than the Unity of God; and it was against his revelations concerning Doomsday that his opponents directed their satire during the first twelve years. It was not love of their half-dead gods but anger at the wretch who was never tired of telling them, in the name of Allah, that all their life was idle and despicable, that in the other world they would be the outcasts, which opened the floodgates of irony and scorn against Mohammed. And it was Mohammed's anxiety for his own lot and that of those who were dear to him in that future life, that forced him to seek a solution of the question: who shall bring my people out of the darkness of antithesis into the light of obedience to Allah?
We should, a posteriori, be inclined to imagine a simpler answer to the question than that which Mohammed found; he might have become a missionary of Judaism or of Christianity to the Meccans. However natural such a conclusion may appear to us, from the premises with which we are acquainted, it did not occur to Mohammed. He began—the Qorân tells us expressly—by regarding the Arabs, or at all events his Arabs, as heretofore destitute of divine message[1]: "to whom We have sent no warner before you." Moses and Jesus—not to mention any others—had not been sent for the Arabs; and as Allah would not leave any section of mankind without a revelation, their prophet must still be to come. Apparently Mohammed regarded the Jewish and Christian tribes in Arabia as exceptions to the rule that an ethnical group (ummah) was at the same time a religious unity. He did not imagine that it could be in Allah's plan that the Arabs were to conform to a revelation given in a foreign language. No; God must speak to them in Arabic.[2] Through whose mouth?
[Footnote 1: Qorân, xxxii., 2; xxxiv., 43; xxxvi., 5, etc.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., xii., 2; xiii., 37; XX., 112; XXVI., 195; xli., 44, etc.]
A long and severe crisis preceded Mohammed's call. He was convinced that, if he were the man, mighty signs from Heaven must be revealed to him, for his conception of revelation was mechanical; Allah Himself, or at least angels, must speak to him. The time of waiting, the process of objectifying the subjective, lived through by the help of an overstrained imagination, all this laid great demands upon the psychical and physical constitution of Mohammed. At length he saw and heard that which he thought he ought to hear and see. In feverish dreams he found the form for the revelation, and he did not in the least realize that the contents of his inspiration from Heaven were nothing but the result of what he had himself absorbed. He realized it so little, that the identity of what was revealed to him with what he held to be the contents of the Scriptures of Jews and Christians was a miracle to him, the only miracle upon which he relied for the support of his mission.