Page:Judaism and Islam, a prize essay - Geiger - 1898.pdf/12

 vi PREFACE.

question, whether a mere similarity in the tenets of two different religious sects establishes the fact that an adoption from one into the other has taken place. There are so many general religious ideas that are common to several of the positive religions existent at the time of the rise of Muhammadanism, that we must be very careful not to assert rashly that any one idea found in the Quran is taken from Judaism.

I have therefore given in the different sections the marks and indications, and in the case of some points of greater difficulty, the reasons also, from which I believe myself justified in the conjecture that there has been such a borrowing.

For these three reasons many citations which I might have made from later Islam and later Judaism are excluded, and in like manner many statements also, which do not bear the impress of a borrowing.

On the other hand, the first division had to be added, in order to shew the basis on which the probability of a general borrowing from Judaism rests. After I had once settled the subject in this way, the arrangement of the whole, and more especially of the many disconnected divisions and sub-divisions, gave me no less trouble. The borrowings are of details not of anything comprehensive; they are fragmentary and occasional in that they were chosen according to what Muhammad's reporters knew, and according to what was agreeable to the prophet's individual opinion and aim, consequently there is no close connection. How far I have succeeded in reducing these details to order the reader may see and judge from the book itself.

The materials at my disposal, when I first undertook this work, were only the bare Arabic text of the Quran in Hinckelmann's edition from which the quotations are made,