I 44. THE KORAN, AND THE BIBLE. 177
invented at a later period. The Koran contains many inconsis tencies and contradictions; but the expositors hold that the later command supersedes the earlier.
The restoration of the chronological order of the Suras is neces sary for a proper understanding of the gradual development of Islam in the mind and character of its author.1 There is a con siderable difference between the Suras of the earlier, middle, and later periods. In the earlier, the poetic, wild, and rhapsodical ele ment predominates; hi the middle, the prosaic, narrative, and missionary; in the later, the official and legislative. Mohammed began with descriptions of natural objects, of judgment, of heaven and hell, impassioned, fragmentary utterances, mostly in brief sentences; he went on to dogmatic assertions, historical statements from Jewish and Christian sources, missionary appeals and per suasions ; and he ended with the dictatorial commands of a legislator and warrior. " He who at Mecca is the admonisher and persuader, at Medina is the legislator and the warrior, who dictates obedience, and uses other weapons than the pen of the poet and the scribe. When business pressed, as at Medina, poetry makes way for prose,2 and although touches of the poeti cal element occasionally break forth, and he has to defend him self up to a very late period against the charge of being merely a poet, yet this is rarely the case in the Medina Suras; and we are startled by finding obedience to God and the Apostle, God's gifts and the Apostlcfs, God's pleasure and the Apostle's, spoken of in the same breath, and epithets, and attributes, applied to Allah, openly applied to Mohammed, as in Sura IX."'1
1 The present order, says Muir (Cordn, p. 41), is almost a direct inversion of the natural chronological order; the longest which mostly belong to the later period of Mohammed, being placed first, and the shortest last. Weil, Sprenger, and Muir have paid much attention to the chronological arrangement. Noldeke also, in his Gcschichtc dcs Qornns, has fixed the order of the Suras, with a reasonable degree of certainty on the basis of Mohammedan traditions and a searching analysis of the text; and he has been mainly followed by Rodwell in his English version.
2 The ornament of metre and rhyme, however, is preserved throughout.
3 Rodwell, p. X. Comp. Deutsch, I c., p. 121.
178 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
The materials of the Koran, as far as they are not productions of the author's own imagination, were derived from the floating traditions of Arabia and Syria, from rabbinical Judaism, and a corrupt Christianity, and adjusted to his purposes.
Mohammed had, in his travels, come in contact with profes sors of different religions, and on his first journey with cameldrivers he fell in with a Nestorian monk of Bostra, who goes by different names (Bohari, Bahyra, Sergius, George), and wel comed the youthful prophet with a presage of his future great ness.1 His wife Chadijah and her cousin Waraka (a reputed convert to Christianity, or more probably a Jew) are said to have been well acquainted with the sacred books of the Jews and the Christians.
The Koran, especially in the earlier Suras, speaks often and highly of the Scriptures; calls them "the Book of God," "the Word of God," "the Tourat" (Thora, the Pentateuch), "the Gospel "(Ynyil), and describes the Jews and Christians as "the people of the Book/7 or "of the Scripture," or "of the Gospel." It finds in the Scriptures prophecies of Mohammed and his suc cess, and contains narratives of the fall of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Deluge, Abraham and Lot, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and Joseph, John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary and Jesus, sometimes in the words of the Bible, but mostly distorted and interspersed with rabbinical and apocryphal fables.2
It is quite probable that portions of the Bible were read to Mo hammed ; but it is very improbable that he read it himself; for according to the prevailing Moslem tradition he could not read at all, and there were no Arabic translations before the Moham medan conquests, which spread the Arabic language in the con quered countries. Besides, if he had read the Bible with any degree of care, he could not have made such egregious blunders.
1 Muir, Life of Moh., I. 35; Stanley, p. 366.
2 See a collection of these correspondences in the original Arabic and in English in Sir William Muir's Coran, pp. 66 sqq. Muir concludes that Mo hammed knew the Bible, and believed in its divine origin and authority.