History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

These settled oasis tribes were traders as much as pastoralists, and Islam was from the start a semi-urban trader’s religion rather than a desert one. But the desert was important, because Jews living on its fringes, or moving to it to escape the corruptions of city life, such as the Nazarites, had always practised a more rigorous form of Judaism and, in particular, had been uncompromising in their monotheism. That was what attracted Mohammed. The influence of Christianity, which would not have been strictly monotheistic in his eyes, was very slight, at any rate at this early stage. What he seems to have wished to do was to destroy the polytheistic paganism of the oasis culture by giving the Arabs Jewish ethical monotheism in a language they could understand and in terms adapted to their ways. He accepted the Jewish God and their prophets, the idea of fixed law embodied in scripture – the Koran being an Arabic substitute for the Bible – and the addition of an Oral Law applied in religious courts. Like the Jews, the Moslems were originally reluctant to commit Oral Law to writing. Like the Jews, they eventually did so. Like the Jews, they developed the practice of submitting points of law to their rabbis or muftis, soliciting a responsum, and the earliest responsa seem to have consciously adopted a Judaic formula. Like the Jews, the Moslems accepted strict and elaborate codes covering diet, ritual purity and cleanliness. Mohammed’s development of a separate religion began wh...