The case of
Jewish converts is a different matter. But in Christianity also much
Jewish wisdom was to be found at that time and it is well known that
even the Eastern churches regarded numerous precepts of the Old
Testament, including those that dealt with ritual, as binding upon
them. In any case the spirit of Judaism is present, either directly or
working through Christianity, as an influence wherever Islam
accommodated itself to the new intellectual and spiritual life which
it had encountered. It was a compromise which affected the most
trivial details of life, and in these matters religious scrupulosity
was carried to a ridiculous point: here we may see the outcome of that
Judaism which, as has been said, was then a definite element in
Eastern Christianity. Together with Jewish, Greek and classical ideas
were also naturally operative, while Persian and other ancient
Oriental conceptions were transmitted to Islam by Christianity: these
instances I have collectively termed Christian because Christianity
then represented the whole of later classical intellectualism, which
influenced Islam for the most part through Christianity.
It seems that the communication of these ideas to Muhammedanism was
impeded by the necessity of translating them not only into a kindred
language, but into one of wholly different linguistic structure. For
Muhammedanism the difficulty was lessened by the fact that it had
learned Christianity in Syria and Persia through the Semitic dialect
known as Aramaic, by which Greek and Persian culture had been
transmitted to the Arabs before the rise of Islam.
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