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Updated: June 15, 2025
Islam is often able to supplement its borrowings from Christianity at the original sources, and when they have thus been deepened and purified, these adaptations are returned to Christianity in Muhammedan form.
Spacious houses were built for the leaders, and palaces for the generals, and this collection of buildings soon became an important military town, with strongly marked Muhammedan characteristics.
The Ismailians regarded Obaid himself as the Mahdi, and they also believed in incarnations of the "universal soul," which in former ages had appeared as the Hebrew Prophets, but which to the Muhammedan manifested itself as imans. The iman is properly the leader of public worship, but it is not so much an office as a seership with mystical attributes.
Thus the thinkers and their demands for justice and righteous dealing were reconciled to the blind fatalism of the masses, which again was not a native Muhammedan product, but is the outcome of the religious spirit of the East. The problem of reconciling the attributes of God with the dogma of His unity was solved with no less subtlety.
Even the idea of love towards enemies, which would have been unintelligible to Muhammed, made its way into the traditions: "the most virtuous of acts is to seek out him who rejects thee, to give to him that despises thee and to pardon him that oppresses thee." A man's "neighbour" has ever been, despite the teaching of Jesus, to the Christian and to the Muhammedan, his co-religionist.
J. Goldziher has published an interesting study showing how many words borrowed from this source occur in the written Muhammedan traditions: an almost complete version of the Lord's Prayer is quoted.
The Muhammedan movement at its outset was influenced not by the real Christianity of the time but by a Christianity which Muhammed criticised in certain details and forced into harmony with his preconceived ideas. His imagination was profoundly impressed by the existence of Christianity as a revealed religion with a founder of its own.
But it soon became a favourite and trusted implement and eventually its influence upon Muhammedan philosophy became paramount. Here we meet with a further Christian influence, which, when once accepted, very largely contributed to secure a similar development of mediaeval Christian and Muhammedan thought.
These relations were naturally modified in the course of centuries; the crusades, the Turkish wars and the great expansion of Europe widened the breach between Christianity and Islam, while as the East was gradually brought under ecclesiastical influence, the contrast grew deeper: the theory, however, that the Muhammedan conquerors and their successors were inspired by a fanatical hatred of Christianity is a fiction invented by Christians.
For eight years he was willing to purchase an inglorious peace by paying tribute to the caliph; but when his treasure failed him and the payment was discontinued, the Arabs marched against the nearest provinces of the empire, offering to the inhabitants their choice of either paying tribute or receiving the Muhammedan religion; and they then began on their western frontier that rapid career of conquest which they had already begun on the eastern frontier against their late masters, the Persians.
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