Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/68

 Rh doctrine of Resurrection and judgment. This explains the large number of weak points that the book of Mohammed's revelations, written down by his first followers, offered to Jewish and Christian polemics. It was easy for the theologians of those religions to point out numberless mistakes in the work of the illiterate Arabian prophet, especially where he maintained that he was repeating and confirming the contents of their Bible. The Qorânic revelations about Allah's intercourse with men, taken from apocryphal sources, from profane legends like that of Alexander the Great, sometimes even created by Mohammed's own fancy—such as the story of the prophet Ṣâliḥ, said to have lived in the north of Arabia, and that of the prophet Hûd, supposed to have lived in the south; all this could not but give them the impression of a clumsy caricature of true tradition. The principal doctrines of Synagogue and Church had apparently been misunderstood, or they were simply denied as corruptions.

The conversion to Islâm, within a hundred years, of such nations as the Egyptian, the Syrian, and the Persian, can hardly be attributed to anything but the latent talents, the formerly suppressed energy of the Arabian race having found a favourable soil for its development; talents and energy, however, not of a missionary kind. If Islâm is said to have been from its beginning