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Introduction
Abraham in the Koran
The
Galatian Test
Conclusion
Footnotes
Home
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Abraham in the Koran
That Mohammad made very frequent
references to Abraham in the Koran is just a matter of reading it. Abraham
is referred to on some 40 pages of the text, in many cases many times; and
the reference is not casual. That there is one God is Mohammad’s message.
For him to associate it with Abraham given Abraham’s repute and stature as
a man of religion throughout the Arabian peninsula and beyond was perfectly
natural. It is useful to look at a
couple of examples of how Abraham figures in the Koran and why.
One, which appears in the Heythrop
advert, is Mohammad’s attribution to Abraham and his son Ishmael of a role
with Allah in the ‘founding’ of the Kabah in Mecca (Koran 2,124ff). As a
claim it was of immense importance to Mohammad’s endeavour to convert his
fellow countrymen to monotheism. For centuries prior to Mohammad the Kaaba
had been a principal sanctuary of Arab religion, which was
polytheistic and animistic, both of which Mohammad was determined to
eradicate. It was a sanctuary built to house the Black Stone, probably of
meteorite origin, quite alien to its desert surroundings and therefore
mysterious and, understandably in a pre-scientific age, an object of
mystery, and hence of veneration. It had made Mecca famous as a centre of
pilgrimage, and during the pilgrimage periods the Arab tribes would call a
truce on their perpetual warfare. Its status in Arab tribal religion could
not have been by-passed. Mohammad was no mean religious tactician; he was
very alive to the power of continuity and tradition. He was born and
brought up in Mecca. He would naturally have worshipped at the Kaaba. On
conquering Mecca he brought it into his monotheism. And probably not just
for reasons of strategy. It would have meant a lot to him. He declared it
had been made ‘a sanctuary for mankind’ by God (2.125) and that ‘Abraham
and Ismael built it and dedicated it’ (2.127. He called it ‘the holy
Mosque’ (2.143). Mohammad could not have abolished the Kaaba for all it
polytheistic history and associations, even if he had wished to, which he
didn’t anyway. It was too significant in the minds and hearts of the Arab
world. To associate Abraham with it
however, indeed as its co-founder with God, bearing in mind that in the
semitic world Abraham was identified with monotheism, enabled Mohammad to
detach the Kaaba from its historic polytheism and enable it to continue to
play a huge part in the new religion he was establishing among the Arabs.
A second example is that
recorded in verses 74 – 84 of sura 6, entitled Cattle It is an interesting
account by Mohammad of Abraham’s own conversion to monotheism. He is very
likely recounting his own personal religious experience. He presents
Abraham as correcting his father (whom Mohammad calls Azar, not Terah as in
the Bible) for worshipping idols; then he describes how Abraham himself
stops worshipping stars, the moon and the sun as gods, the light of which
comes and goes as the day comes and goes. “I will not worship gods that
fade”. He turns instead his ‘face to Him who has created the heavens and
the earth and I will live a righteous life. I am no idolater’. The phrase
Mohammad uses –‘He who created the heavens and the earth’- he will have
taken from the very Jewish sources (cf below) which influenced him in the
direction of monotheism.
Mohammad turned to Abraham in
particular to find support for his monotheism for very good reasons.
Abraham was a towering figure in Arab religious culture. Judaism was a
powerful influence. Mohammad being an Arab was a Semite. The influence of
Judaism which Mohammad encountered throughout Arabia as a merchant, in
Mecca before his escape to Medina, and in Medina, cannot be overstated when
discussing his personal religious development, both intellectual and
devotional, and the evolution of the Koran. The Jewish community in Medina
was the strongest in Arabia. It probably was composed mainly of judaised
Arabs, not of immigrants from Palestine. Christianity was also represented
here and there throughout the peninsula but it was quite cut off from the
main centres of Christian life and learning, and judging by the imperfect
and fragmentary notions that Mohammad had of Christianity, which we find in
the Koran, it would appear to have been of a quite rudimentary type.
It has been put to me in
discussion of these matters that the rapid, indeed quite dramatic,
conversion of the Arabs from polytheism to monotheism under Mohammad and
after his death must have a deeper, more satisfying, explanation than just
imposition through military conquest, that very likely Mohammad actually
functioned as the tipping point in a process of change. The Arabian
peninsula was not cut off from the civilisations around it, from the
philosophical and religious movements lapping its shores and percolating
through it through its many trade centres. The east coast of the Red Sea
was the trade route from the Yemen to Syria. The Yemen then as now traded
by sea and by land with the Indian subcontinent which was Hindu and with
Syria and Egypt which were Christian. The likelihood is that there were
many Arabs, Mohammad being one, who were deeply dis-satisfied with the
prevailing polytheism and animism of their society, who had come to regard
their own religious culture as backward and outdated and who were greatly
influenced by what they learned from Jews and Christians, who played the
role of a leaven within the more intellectually progressive sectors of Arab
society. That would explain why in the chronologically earlier sections of
the Koran Mohammad showed very considerable appreciation of both Judaism
and Christianity, an openness and appreciation which, especially in the
case of Judaism, turned to outright hostility in Medina (cf. 2.109-149, and
below).What has been put to me, and I find it very reasonable, is that
Mohammad proved the tipping point at a crucial moment in the religious and
intellectual evolution of Arab society. The time was ripe. He was an
immense personality, with no misgivings at all about himself and his role,
he came forward with what was quickly turned into a text, it incorporated a
wide range of Jewish, Christian and Arab stories with which his audience
could identify, and its message, which was mainly about God and himself,
was very simple, straightforward and dynamic.
Almost definitely it was from
his contacts with Judaism more than anywhere else that he derived his
monotheism; and from its history his perception of himself as a prophet
along the lines of the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets. Mohammad drew
considerably on Bible stories, especially those of the Old Testament and to
a lesser extent on Arab legends. It is difficult not to speculate that the
Christian story of the Annunciation influenced his choice of Gabriel as the
angel he believed he encountered in his moments of mystical meditation. His
references to OT characters are everywhere in the Koran. However, many of
the biblical stories he repeats or he alludes to in the Koran are in
various curious versions which doubtless he had heard and picked up here
and there in the course of his business travels and military undertakings
across Arabia as well as from the Jewish communities in Mecca and Medina.
For example, he probably confuses Mary the sister of Moses and Aaron with
Mary the Mother of Jesus. Mohammad was a preacher and a ruler, a war-lord
in fact; he was not a scholar.
Nothing comes from nothing.
Like any other founder of a religion, or indeed any ideology, no matter how
radical and original, he had to have sources. An example is his attitude
towards Jerusalem. Jerusalem mattered. It was a huge element in the whole
religious mythology and culture of the Semitic world to which as an Arab he
belonged. It was of immense significance in all the accounts of the
religion of the Jews whom he had met and listened to since childhood and
throughout his merchant dealings as an adult. Jerusalem, not Mecca, was the
city he first ordered his followers to turn towards when praying
(2.142-150). However, that changed when his attitude towards the Jews
changed; and that happened in Medina.
The Jews of Medina, who were
organised into three clans or tribes, refused as was to be expected, to
accept his claim to be a prophet. For Mohammad as an item of dogma his
religious position was his political position, so disagreement was
inevitable. Besides, there were considerable economic disagreements between
him and the three tribes. There was also the position Mohammad had with
respect to the Arabs of the city and the facts of their relationship are
very complex. Medina was a tortuous web. And he also wanted to provide for
his loyal followers, the Muhajirun (‘refugees’), who had fled with him from
Mecca and who were in straitened circumstances. Over a period of years the
outcomes of all this were violent. He had one of the three Jewish tribes,
the Banu Qainuqa, which ran the market, expelled after his defeat of the
Meccans at the battle of Badr in 624. The second tribe, the Banu-‘n-Nadir,
was given the same treatment after the inconclusive battle of Uhud the
following year and its estates were divided up between his followers. It was
the third tribe, the Banu Quraiza, whom he dealt with most savagely. After
the siege of Medina (the battle of he Trench) in 627, which he repulsed,
Mohammad had all their men executed, 600 plus is the number usually given,
and their women and children sold into slavery –except the wife of one of
his victims who was made a concubine. It is likely this tribe had been
guilty of intrigue against him. Two years later he went on to lay siege to
the Jewish oasis in Khaybar a hundred miles away. The Jews submitted and
were allowed to remain there on the condition that they sent half of their
date harvest to Medina (fn.3). This complete reversal in his attitude
towards the Jews is recorded in the Koran. In 29.46, chronologically an
early chapter, he instructs his followers (‘the faithful’) “Be courteous
when you argue with the People of the Book. Say ‘We believe in that which
is revealed to us and which was revealed to you. Our God and your God is
one’.” In 5.82, a later chapter, it
had all become so very different: “You will find that the most implacable
of men in their enmity towards the faithful are the Jews and the pagans”.
Here was a man who was born
and brought up in Mecca, the most important town on the eastern coastal
strip of the Red Sea, on the caravan route between the Yemen and Syria,
only fifty miles from the sea itself, a great centre of trade and of Arab
pilgrimage, a town that over the centuries would have seen traders from all
over the Arabian peninsula, from Africa, from Egypt, from the countries to
the north we now call Jordan, Syria and Palestine, most likely from parts
of the eastern Mediterranean and eastwards into Mesopotamia (Iraq) and
Persia (Iran). One can only guess at the influences, the exchange of ideas,
the talking, the debating, the arguing, the likely atmosphere of lively and
energetic intercourse. Jews, Christians, Zaroastrians, Hindus possibly too,
monotheists, polytheists, animists, a veritable melting pot of ideas and
beliefs. Any man like Mohammad, intensely religious and thoughtful, deeply
uncomfortable with the polytheistic religion of his own society, a merchant
and trader himself in Mecca, encountering all sorts of alternative
influences on a daily basis, listening to the tales and stories of the
wider religious world he was swimming in, a religious world so much richer
and lively than the narrow one he experienced among his own people –any
such person would have questioned the religious beliefs he had imbibed from
his culture. He began retreating to the solitude of Mount Hira outside of
Mecca for reflection and contemplation.
His country was Arabia. Its
religion was polytheism of a very crude sort. .His tribe was the Quraish,
the most important tribe in Mecca. The principal sanctuary in Mecca was the
Kaaba. Inside it was an image of the god Hubal. ‘Allah’ was probably the
tribal god of the Quraish. With Allah there were associated goddesses who
were believed to be his daughters, such as Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat about
whom he was to say in due course ‘They are but names whom you (the pagans
of Mecca) and your fathers have invented’ (53.20) One can almost reach out
and feel the frustration, possibly the shame too, that Mohammad must have
been feeling, a man of intense religious sensitivity, as he listened to
accounts of a much deeper, much more profound spirituality, than that of
his countrymen. It is a frustration turning to an anger that shouts out at
the reader on almost every page of the Koran. When he eventually rejected
the polytheism of his whole upbringing, the sense of liberation and the
drive to convert his people must have been nothing less than volcanic.
Here was a man who, as
tradition has it, accompanied his merchant uncle on a caravan at the age of
12 to Syria; who at the age of 25 was given charge of a Syrian caravan with
goods belonging to.Khadjia, a rich widow, whom he married soon afterwards;
a man who remained a merchant till he was 40. For over 25 years he and his
fellow Qurayshi traders ‘on their summer and winter journeyings’ (106.1) travelled the caravan route from
Mecca to Syria and back, along the Red Sea coastal road, making detours
inland to Medina, north in the direction of Jerusalem, revered and holy in
all Semitic religious folklore, with the desert of Mount Sinai and its
Christian monasteries to his left (cf 95.2), staying overnight in
Jerusalem, stopping there to trade, travelling the banks of the Jordon and
the Dead Sea, on to Damascus.
It is not difficult to
picture Mohammad having endless discussions and arguments, some warm, some
bitter, with fellow travellers, fellow traders, men of all different
religions, from all over the Near East, in town after town, inn after inn,
camp site after camp site, arguing deep into the night, such as on the
Night of Qadr (97.1) when ‘night is peace, till break of dawn’ (97.3), and
locked in discussion with ‘the People of the Book’ (98.1). One can get the
feel of it all when, after what must have been a really stormy meeting, he
exclaims in outright frustration, even anger: ‘Unbelievers, I do not
worship what you worship, nor do you worship what I worship. I shall never
worship what you worship, nor will you worship what I worship. You have
your own religion and I have mine’ (109.1). It must have been a very bad
experience, that one, to make him so defiant and angry. . Little wonder he
‘sought refuge in the Lord of Daybreak…from the mischief of the night and
the mischief of conjuring witches’ (113.1), ‘ the mischief of the slinking
prompter who whispers in the hearts of men, from jinn and men’ (114.1).
He was such a different man
in those early years before power in Medina and Mecca got hold of him,
before politics and the command of armies led him into violence, before his determination to
assert the unique religious and political status he claimed for himself took
possession of him, before he found himself involved in the complexities of
government and having to enact all possible rules and regulations about
behaviour from sex to inheritance, from how women should dress to the
treatment of slave girls, from prayer to rituals, from diets to divorce,
and defend himself and his vision of God against warring religious and
political factions. He was a different man in those early years when he
could delight in the beauty of his desert world, in ‘the sun and its midday
brightness, the moon which rises after it, the day which reveals God’s
splendour and the night which veils it’ (91.1); when he felt ‘the glow of
the sunset’ and he marvelled at ‘the moon in its full perfection’ (84.16)
and the ‘heavens with their constellations’ (85.1) burning like fires in
the deep darkness of the cloudless desert night with ‘stars of piercing
brightness’ (86.2). He was best in those first early years of his
conversion to a belief in the one God, before power spun its web around
him.
I have asked the question,
where did Mohammad get his religious ideas from? There are two answers to
that question: Mohammad’s own answer as in 29:48; and the answer that the
texts and, it must be said, common sense, suggest. In 29:48 he puts this
very significant assertion into the mouth of God: ‘Never have you read a
book before this, nor have you ever transcribed one with your right hand.
Had you done either of these, the unbelievers might have doubted. But to
those who are endowed with knowledge it is an undoubted sign. Only the
wrongdoers deny our signs’. It would seem from this that he had been
challenged about his sources, very likely the accusation had been made that
he had taken material for the Koran from such sources as the Jewish
scriptures. That will have been the context. However, for a man so utterly
convinced as he was that in his periods of silent and isolated meditation
the religious thoughts that had flooded his mind were the words of the
angel Gabriel revealing the revelation of God himself from all eternity,
such an accusation was intolerable; and, as he says, liable to undermine
belief in his message, and undermine it in the most fundamental way. His
message was that the Koran was God’s revelation pure and simple, without
any human input of any kind. Even to the extent that the very language of
the message was somehow God’s language. For that reason Mohammad
emphatically denies he had read any book from which he lifted material or
transcribed any text into the Koran whatsoever. And despite the tradition
among Moslems that he could neither read nor write, he probably could. It
is hard to believe that he could have spent some twenty five years as a
trader, year in, year out, and never learnt to keep accounts and write out
bills and read them and check them and all the rest.
Texts matter. Unwittingly,
not intending the text to be taken as a representative list of sources,
because he would not have considered that any Jewish and Christian
antecedents were in any way the source of his monotheism. (cf 29.48),
Mohammad gives us an alternative answer in no uncertain terms in 4.163ff to
the question where he got at least some of his religious ideas from. It is
but one example out of many: ‘We have revealed our will to you as we
revealed it to Noah and to the prophets who came after him and the tribes;
to Jesus, Job, Jonah, Aaron, Solomon and David to whom we gave the Psalms.
Of some apostles we have already told you, but there are others of whom we
have no yet spoken (God spoke directly to Moses): apostles who brought good
news to mankind’. This was the religious culture into which Mohammad had
wholeheartedly immersed himself over his whole adult lifetime. His world
and his culture were semitic from top to toe, and his whole adult life, as
we have seen, was one of incessant commercial and intense religious
intercourse with all that semitic world from Syria in the North to the
Yemen in the far south. It was all a bubbling cauldron of religious
mythology and folk-telling available to every tribe and nation and
religious leader within it, Mohammad no less than any other. In camp site
after camp site, in inn after inn, in endless discussions after endless
discussions, the whole length of the Red Sea coast from Aden to Sinai, from
Sinai to the Lebanon, and back again, he had heard the stories, had
listened to them read aloud, taken them back with him and pondered them in
the silence and the solitude of Mount Hira. The texts of the Jews and the
Christians, and their beliefs, were in place centuries before Mohammed.
They and their stories, told and retold, were part and parcel of the total
religious discourse. He took them in like a man taking food and imbibed
them like a man in the heat of the day stooping to a fountain. From them he could borrow, which he did;
and with them he could disagree, which he did; and could disagree very
forcefully indeed. It is all in that powerful verse: ‘Unbelievers, I do not
worship what you worship, nor do you worship what I worship. I shall never
worship what you worship, nor will you worship what I worship. You have
your own religion and I have mine’ (109.3). Out of it all, indifferent to
sources, he constructed his ‘own religion’, not in one flash of inspiration
but gradually, stumblingly sometimes, adding here, amending there, through
the major vicissitudes of his life, in Mecca, then in Medina, and finally
back again in Mecca, to the moment of his death in 632. Texts matter. Evidence matters.
In his Meccan days, as we
have seen, he had been very friendly towards the Jews. He had told his
followers ‘Dispute not, unless in a kindly way, with the people of the
Book. Say: we believe in that which is revealed to us and which was
revealed to you. Our God and your God is one’’ (29.45). But when the Jews,
as was –and is- inevitable, refused to acknowledge his prophetic claims, he
began not just to distance himself from them but also to criticise and
oppose them. He told his followers: ‘Believers, do not make friends with
any but your own people. They will spare no pains to corrupt you. They
desire nothing but your ruin’ (3.114). And finally he felt obliged to say:
‘You will find that the most implacable of men in their enmity to the
faithful are the Jews and the pagans’ (5.82). He began to make a clear
differentiation between his new religion and that of the Jews and
Christians. His followers were now to turn in prayer to Mecca, not
Jerusalem (2.138), have their own day of prayer rather than the Jewish
Sabbath or the Lord’s Day of the Christians, their own feast of Ramadam as
substitute for the Jewish Day of Atonement (2.179ff); and he was emphatic
that Jesus was not the Son of God but ‘the son of Mary’ only (4.169) and
that God was not a Trinity (ditto). Both positively and negatively, as a
source of what to adopt and what to reject, Judaism and Christianity were
indispensable to Mohammad, especially Judaism.
Constant reference is made in
the Koran to the books of the Jews and the Christians and the –Jewish and
Christian- prophets (nabi):: Abraham (87.19), Moses (ibid & 32.23),
David (17.57), and Jesus (57.27 -‘to him we gave the gospel’ [Injil, a corruption of the Greek
euaggelion]). The Torah (Taurat) is mentioned as revealed to Moses (4.43,),
the Psalms (21.105 etc), and as already stated the Gospels. Mohammad mentions eight apostles (rasul)
in the Koran in addition to himself: Noah, Lot, Ismael, Moses, Hud, Shuaib,
Salih and Jesus. Shuaid is the Midianite Jethro (Koran 26.176 & Exodus
18.1) The angelology of the Koran is taken from both Judaism and
Christianity. There is Jabrail (Gabriel) who conveyed the divine word to
the prophets and there is Shaitan (Satan) who is spoken of in various ways,
most notably for the part he played in getting Adam and Eve banished from
Paradise (2.32-38), a biblical story par excellence. This list, however, is
nothing more than a taster. The reader must look to the actual text of the
Koran itself to appreciate the full story of inspiration and extraction
which the Jewish-Christian Bible provided for Mohammad. I have barely
touched on it. Even the tender description by Mohammad of Abraham, used in
the Heythrop advert, as ‘the saintly Abraham, whom God chose to be his
friend’ (4.125) is taken from Isaiah 41.8: ‘But you Israel my servant, you
Jacob whom I have chosen, race of Abraham my friend’.
So, I can now conclude this
section by addressing the basic issue, whether the assertion of the
Heythrop advertisement that: ‘Abraham is of decisive importance for all
three traditions’ can be sustained. My answer in respect of Islam is in two
parts. As Islam itself understands its own origins, in the terms of its own
theology, Abraham is not and cannot be decisive. Historically and
factually, however, if we understand Abraham, as we should, as
representative of Judaism, he (ie Judaism) definitely is. In other words, Judaism
(and Christianity to a lesser extent) had a decisive influence in the
formation of Islam. The monotheism of post Exile Judaism, a monotheism
Abraham did not share, and that of Christianity is what was decisive for
Islam. But that long journey, that long march, had to have a beginning. It
began with Noah and it found individual and concrete shape in Abraham; and
as we shall see, and as we know, it found its fulfilment in Christ ‘the son
of David, the son of Abraham’ (Matt.1.1).
However, the monotheism of
Mohammad, which is the decisive feature of Islam, was not considered by him
to be attributable to Abraham at all. His monotheism he attributed it to
God’s revelation only. What Mohammed uses the monotheism of Abraham for, as
a very significant figure in the general religious culture of the semitic
people of his time, is as an argument to persuade others. For Mohammad, and
hence for Islam, Abraham is not to be considered a source or a cause of
their monotheism, but only a powerful examplar of it. For that reason
Abraham in terms of Islam’s own belief system is not of decisive importance
for Islam.
Factually however he was. He
together with other important biblical figures such as Moses and Jesus was
a major source for Mohammad’s conversion to monotheism. If one takes what’s
in the Koran as evidence, then it is reasonable to conclude that it was in
Judaism and Christianity, especially the former, with their religious
teaching as in their Scriptures, that Mohammad discovered monotheism. How
else can one read his instruction to his followers in 29.26 to be
‘courteous when you argue with the People of the Book’, telling them to say
to them ‘We believe that which is revealed to us and which was revealed to
you. Our God and your God is one’: I would suggest that the sura The Table
is the one to study in this very important respect. The ecumenical
implications are incalculable. In the quest for eirenical cooperation
between Christianity, Judaism and Islam the figure of Abraham has emerged
as a sort of unifying factor. It is quite reasonable to hold that Abraham
represents one common feature between the three religions in that he
figures in all three. But it is the way he figures in each that really
matters.
For the Jews Abraham
represents God’s choice of themselves as his people, the people of Israel,
his nation. God’s choice happened with him. God’s choice of them continued
when they were ‘aliens in Egypt’, and ‘in the desert’, and was associated
by them with the Canaanite land, in which Abraham first settled after
leaving the land of his birth and which, in
their belief, God himself took from the Canaanites by force and gave
to them as ‘their heritage’ (cf Acts 13.v16-20) Physical descent from Abraham
- being ‘of the stock of Abraham’ (v.26)- is essential in Jewish
belief, as is that land. For
Christians, whose belief is that God has no favourites (Acts 10.34),
Abraham was the moment when God’s Saving Plan for all mankind took its
first physical step towards the incarnation of His Son and universal
salvation. For Christianity, as Paul put it with limpid simplicity to the
people of Pisidian Antioch (v.26) the message of salvation has been sent to
all mankind. In Islamic belief Abraham was one out a long line of prophets
and apostles to whom Allah, the one and only God (la ilaha illallah) made
partial revelations, leading up to the final complete revelation made to
Mohammad.
Abraham accordingly figures
in each religion very differently. Ecumenical dialogue can be very ill
served by wishful thinking, no matter how well intended. It is best served
by correct understanding. Dialogue with Islam must rest on clear
understanding of how Islam understands itself. What was ‘decisive’ for
Islam, historically and theologically, was Mohammad’s conversion to
monotheism; and in the mind of Mohammad no one had any role in that except
God. Mohammad did not ascribe his conversion to Abraham or Judaism. He did
not believe he owed anything in any way to anybody but God. It constitutes
a fundamental misreading of the way Islam understands itself to suggest
that anybody or anything brought Mohammad’s conversion about other than God
by direct revelation.
Not that Mohammad denigrated
in any way the contribution to belief in God as the one and only God by
Abraham or Moses or Jesus or any other ‘apostle’ ‘We raised an apostle in
every nation’, he says in16.36, ‘saying: Serve God and keep away from false
gods’; and ‘An apostle is sent to every nation’ (10.48). Mohammad however
believed that his distinction and his role were to be ‘the Apostle of
Allah’, (literally ‘the God’) who was the tribal god of the Quraish, who
revealed to him that He was in fact the one and only God and that with that
revelation all revelation had come to an end, and that Allah was the one
and only, the universal, God (2,152; 3.164, 6.103 etc)
In terms of its own belief
system Islam owes nothing to Abraham except to be an earlier exemplar of
monotheism, even though factually he probably wasn’t a monotheist. What
however was more factually decisive for Islam was the deep religious nature
of Mohammad, his personal disquiet with the religion of his upbringing, and
his earnest searching for a deeper spirituality and the truth about God.
That is what led him into the discussions and conversations which he held
with like-minded Arabs and with Jews and Christians over a period of years.
He shared their Scriptures and he heard their stories, stories about
Abraham, Moses, Jesus and many others, whose lives he found deeply
inspirational. All that formed the material on which he mediated in the
solitude of Mount Hira. Out of those Scriptures and those stories as he
remembered them, together with his own earnest reflections, and his
appropriation of those elements of his 7th century tribal
society which he found acceptable, came the Koran.
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