This rough sketch of what Islam meant when it set out to conquer the world, is not very likely to create the impression that its incredibly rapid extension was due to its superiority over the forms of civilization which it supplanted.  Lammens’s assertion, that Islam was the Jewish religion simplified according to Arabic wants and amplified by some Christian and Arabic traditions, contains a great deal of truth, if only we recognize the central importance for Mohammed’s vocation and preaching of the Christian 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 Qoranic 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 Salih, said to have lived in the north of Arabia, and that of the prophet Hud, 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 Islam, 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 Islam is said to have been from its beginning down to the present day, a missionary religion,[1] then “mission” is to be taken here in a quite peculiar sense, and special attention must be given to the preparation of the missionary field by the Moslim armies, related by history and considered as most important by the Mohammedans themselves.

[Footnote 1:  With extraordinary talent this thesis has been defended by Professor T.W.  Arnold in the above quoted work, The Preaching of Islam, which fully deserves the attention also of those who do not agree with the writer’s argument.  Among the many objections that may be raised against Prof.  Arnold’s conclusion, we point to the undeniable fact, that the Moslim scholars of all ages hardly speak of “mission” at all, and always treat the extension of the true faith by holy war as one of the principal duties of the Moslim community.]