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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, and God was represented as constantly appealing to earlier revelations of Himself.
The reason for this seems to have been the idea that none of the older prophets, not even Jesus, of whom the Qoran tells the greatest wonders, could have worked a miracle without Mohammed, the Seal of the prophets, having rivalled or surpassed him in this respect.
We, with the diffidence which true science implies, feel obliged merely to call him Mohammed, and to seek in the Qoran, and with great cautiousness in the Tradition, a few principal points of his life and work, in order to see how in his mind the intense feeling of discontent during the misery of his youth, together with a great self-reliance, a feeling of spiritual superiority to his surroundings, developed into a call, the form of which was largely decided by Jewish and Christian influence.
This doctrine of the return, mentioned neither in the Qoran nor in the eschatological tradition of later times, according to Casanova was afterwards changed again into the expectation of the Mahdi, the last of Mohammed's deputies, "a Guided of God," who shall be descended from Mohammed, bear his name, resemble him in appearance, and who shall fill the world once more before its end with justice, as it is now filled with injustice and tyranny.
He sent 'amils, i.e., agents, to the conquered tribes or villages, who had to see that, in the first place, the most important regulations of the Qoran were followed, and, secondly, that the tax into which the duty of almsgiving had been converted was promptly paid, and that the portion of it intended for the central fund at Medina was duly delivered.
This was maintained by the Shi'ites, who are unsurpassed in Islam as falsifiers of history; and the passages which, according to them, are omitted from the official Qoran would involve precisely on account of their reference to the succession, the mortality of Mohammed. All sects and parties have the same text of the Qoran.
At the moment when this conservative instinct began to assert itself among the spiritual leaders, so much foreign matter had already been incorporated into Islam, that the theory of the sufficiency of Qoran and Sunnah could not have been maintained without the labelling operation which we have alluded to.
The translation of this verse has always been a subject of great difference of opinion. He weakens his argument more than is necessary by placing the Tradition upon an almost equal footing with the Qoran as a source, and by ignoring the historical development which is obvious in the Qoran itself.
It became a fundamental dogma of Islam, that the Sunnah was the indispensable completion of the Qoran, and that both together formed the source of Mohammedan law and doctrine; so much so that every party assumed the name of "People of the Sunnah" to express its pretension to orthodoxy.
Muhammed had an indefinite idea of the word of God as known to him from other religions. He was unable to realise this idea effectively except as an immediate revelation; hence throughout the Qoran he represents God as speaking in the first person and himself appears as the interlocutor.
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