they did not take great interest in
the conceptions of the "People of the Scripture," as they called the Jews,
Christians, and perhaps some other sects arisen from these communities.

But Mohammed's deeply felt misery awakened his interest in them. Whether
this had been the case with a few others before him in the milieu of Mecca,
we need not consider, as it does not help to explain his actions. If wide
circles had been anxious to know more about the contents of the "Scripture"
Mohammed would not have felt in the dark in the way that he did. We shall
probably never know, by intercourse with whom it really was that Mohammed
at last gained some knowledge of the contents of the sacred books of
Judaism and Christianity; probably through various people, and over a
considerable length of time. It was not lettered men who satisfied his
awakened curiosity; otherwise the quite confused ideas, especially in the
beginning of the revelation, concerning the mutual relations between Jews
and Christians could not be explained. Confusions between Miryam, the
sister of Moses, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, between Saul and Gideon,
mistakes about the relationship of Abraham to Isaac, Ishmael, and Jacob,
might be put down to misconceptions of Mohammed himself, who could not all
at once master the strange material. But his representation of Judaism and
Christianity and a number of other forms of revelation, as almost identical
in their contents, differing only in the place where, the time wherein, and
the messenger of God by whom they came to man; this idea, which runs like
a crimson thread through all the revelations of the first twelve years
of Mohammed's prophecy, could not have existed if he had had an intimate
acquaintance with Jewish or Christian men of letters. Moreover, the many
post-biblical features and stories which the Qoran contains concerning the
past of mankind, indicate a vulgar origin, and especially as regards
the Christian legends, communications from people who lived outside the
communion of the great Christian churches; this is sufficiently proved by
the docetical representation of the death of Jesus and the many stories
about his life, taken from apocryphal sources or from popular oral legends.

Mohammed's unlearned imagination worked all such material together into
a religious history of mankind, in which Adam's descendants had become
divided into innumerable groups of peoples differing in speech and place
of abode, w