A History of Arabic Literature

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE KORAN Born of a poor and lightly esteemed family, Mahomet (or Mohammed), who had begun life by travelling with caravans from Mecca into Syria, had acquired a fortune by his marriage with Khadija. In his days, two religious sects, distinct from the believers in Judaism and Christianity, the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE KORAN Born of a poor and lightly esteemed family, Mahomet (or Mohammed), who had begun life by travelling with caravans from Mecca into Syria, had acquired a fortune by his marriage with Khadija. In his days, two religious sects, distinct from the believers in Judaism and Christianity, the growth of which we have already noticed, had taken root in Arabian soil. One of these was the Rakusiyya, the other the Hanifs. The first was undoubtedly descended from the Mandai'tes, or Christian disciples of St. John Baptist, known in the Middle Ages under the name of Sabians, and of whom a community still exists in Lower Mesopotamia. They were Ebionites, who venerated the Forerunner, and were the predecessors of the Gnostic movement. The Hanifs were Essenians, who fancied themselves to be practising, under the name of the faith of Abraham, a kind of Judaism purified of all ritual observances, and which did not involve any perusal of the sacred writings. It was in the bosom of this sect of the Hanifs that Islamism came into existence. Mahomet himself used to say that he was a Hanif, like those known at Mecca, Ta'if, and Yathrib. Hanif stands for monotheist, a hater of idolatry; and when Mahomet began to preach, the men of Mecca told him he had turned Sabian. These Hanifs carriedabout a book called the Suhuf, or scrolls, of Abraham. A few years previous to the Prophet's mission, a missionary of the sect appeared in the Hijaz, preached the monotheism of Abraham, and found some followers. In later days Mahomet declared these scrolls to be forgeries. Now, were they really a book, as Sprenger believed, or must we accept the title as a vague one, possibly describing the Israelitish Bible ? However that may be, the Christian followers of St. John Baptist and the Hanifs had prepa...