difference between the Suras of the earlier, middle, and later periods. In the earlier, the poetic, wild,
and rhapsodical element predominates; in the middle, the prosaic, narrative, and missionary; in the
later, the official and legislative. Mohammed began with descriptions of natural objects, of judgment,
of heaven and hell, impassioned, fragmentary utterances, mostly in brief sentences; he went on to
dogmatic assertions, historical statements from Jewish and Christian sources, missionary appeals
and persuasions; and he ended with the dictatorial commands of a legislator and warrior. "He who
at Mecca is the admonisher and persuader, at Medina is the legislator and the warrior, who dictates
obedience and uses other weapons than the pen of the poet and the scribe. When business pressed,
as at Medina, poetry makes way for prose,^170 and although touches of the poetical element
occasionally break forth, and he has to defend himself up to a very late period against the charge
of being merely a poet, yet this is rarely the case in the Medina Suras; and we are startled by finding
obedience to God and the Apostle, God’s gifts and the Apostle’s, God’s pleasure and the Apostle’s,
spoken of in the same breath, and epithets, and attributes, applied to Allah, openly applied to
Mohammed, as in Sura IX."^171
The materials of the Koran, as far as they are not productions of the author’s own
imagination, were derived from the floating traditions of Arabia and Syria, from rabbinical Judaism,
and a corrupt Christianity, and adjusted to his purposes.
Mohammed had, in his travels, come in contact with professors of different religions, and
on his first journey with camel-drivers he fell in with a Nestorian monk of Bostra, who goes by
different names (Bohari, Bahyra, Sergius, George), and welcomed the youthful prophet with a
presage of his future greatness.^172 His wife Chadijah and her cousin Waraka (a reputed convert to
Christianity, or more probably a Jew) are said to have been well acquainted with the sacred books
of the Jews and the Christians.
The Koran, especially in the earlier Suras, speaks often and highly of the Scriptures; calls
them "the Book of God," "the Word of God," "the Tourât" (Thora, the Pentateuch), "the Gospel"
(Ynyil), and describes the Jews and Christians as "the people of the Book," or "of the Scripture,"
or "of the Gospel." It finds in the Scriptures prophecies of Mohammed and his success, and contains
narratives of the fall of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Deluge, Abraham and Lot, the destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and Joseph, John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary and Jesus, sometimes
in the words of the Bible, but mostly distorted and interspersed with rabbinical and apocryphal
fables.^173
It is quite probable that portions of the Bible were read to Mohammed; but it is very
improbable that he read it himself; for according to the prevailing Moslem tradition he could not
read at all, and there were no Arabic translations before the Mohammedan conquests, which spread
the Arabic language in the conquered countries. Besides, if he had read the Bible with any degree
of care, he could not have made such egregious blunders. The few allusions to Scripture
paid much attention to the chronological arrangement. Nöldeke also, in his Geschichte des Qôrans, has fixed the order of the
Suras, with a reasonable degree of certainty on the basis of Mohammedan traditions and a searching analysis of the text; and
he has been mainly followed by Rodwell in his English version.(^170) The ornament of metre and rhyme, however, is preserved throughout.
(^171) Rodwell, p. X. Comp. Deutsch, l.c., p. 121.
(^172) Muir, Life of Moh., I. 35; Stanley, p. 366.
(^173) See a collection of these correspondences in the original Arabic and in English in Sir William Muir’s Coran, pp. 66
sqq. Muir concludes that Mohammed knew the Bible, and believed in its divine origin and authority.