In this
department, Islam repaid part of its debt to Christianity, for the
Arabs became the intellectual leaders of the middle ages.
Thus we come to the concluding section of this treatise; before we
enter upon it, two preliminary questions remain for consideration. If
Islam was ready to learn from Christianity in every department of
religious life, what was the cause of the sudden superiority of
Muhammedanism to the rising force of Christianity a few centuries
later? And secondly, in view of the traditional antagonism between the
Christian and Muhammedan worlds, how was Christianity able to adopt so
large and essential a portion of Muhammedan thought?
The answer in the second case will be clear to any one who has
followed our argument with attention. The intellectual and religious
outlook was so similar in both religions and the problem requiring
solution so far identical that nothing existed to impede the adoption
of ideas originally Christian which had been developed in the East.
The fact that the West could accept philosophical and theological
ideas from Islam and that an actual interchange of thought could
proceed in this direction, is the best of proofs for the soundness of
our argument that the roots of Muhammedanism are to be sought in
Christianity. Islam was able to borrow from Christianity for the
reason that Muhammed's ideas were derived from that source: similarly
Christianity was able to turn Arab thought to its own purposes because
that thought was founded upon Christian principles.
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