The relationship of the Qoran to Christianity has been already noted:
it was a book which preached rather than taught and enounced isolated
laws but no connected system. Islam was a clear and simple war-cry
betokening merely a recognition of Arab supremacy, of the unity of God
and of Muhammed's prophetic mission. But in a few centuries Islam
became a complex religious structure, a confusion of Greek philosophy
and Roman law, accurately regulating every department of human life
from the deepest problems of morality to the daily use of the
toothpick, and the fashions of dress and hair. This change from the
simplicity of the founder's religious teaching to a system of
practical morality often wholly divergent from primitive doctrine, is
a transformation which all the great religions of the world have
undergone. Religious founders have succeeded in rousing the sense of
true religion in the human heart. Religious systems result from the
interaction of this impulse with pre-existing capacities for
civilisation. The highest attainments of human life are dependent upon
circumstances of time and place, and environment often exerts a more
powerful influence than creative power. The teaching of Jesus was
almost overpowered by the Graeco-Oriental culture of later Hellenism.
Dissensions persist even now because millions of people are unable to
distinguish pure religion from the forms of expression belonging to an
extinct civilisation. Islam went through a similar course of
development and assumed the spiritual panoply which was ready to hand.
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