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Now, how does Islam appear in the theological field of research? Almost without exception it is presented as an amalgam of Heathen-Jewish-Christian ideas and teachings. Generations of scholars have considered it the task of their life assiduously to investigate the alleged origins of the principles of these teachings and to demonstrate the syncretic character of Islam. Just as Christian controversialists never saw in Islam anything but the product of and act of spiritual theft, modern scholars themselves maintain that the basic ideas of Islam are borrowed from the Biblical religions and describe this "a fact which requires not further discussion". "When one examines each of the elements of Mohammad's system of belief, " Tor Andrae writes, "it seems impossible to decide to which of these religions he is most indebted." Goldziher asserts "that the assimilative character of Islam was already stamped on its brow at its birth. Its founder Muhammad proclaims no new ideas. He has not enriched the ideas about man's relationship with the transcendental and the infinite (144:1) "The proclamation of the Arabic prophet", he continues, "is an eclectic composition of religious ideas which he was inspired to reveal through his contacts with Jewish, Christian and still other ideologies by which he himself was deeply affected, and which he considered suitable for the awakening of a truly religious spirit among his fellow-men; ordinances which he also drew from foreign sources, and which he recognized as necessary for the establishment of a pattern of life in accordance with the divine will. Goldziher, like Tor Andrae, thinks that the Christian elements of the 'Qur'an' have reached Muhammad mostly "through the channel of apocryphal traditions and of the heresies scattered in Eastern Christianity... Muhammad absorbed everything he came across in his superficial contacts in the circle of his associates and he utilized most of it without any fixed plan at all." Gagrieli comes to the same conclusion: "He had only a vague and fragmentary knowledge of the two monotheistic religions preceding his own. He borrowed from the former the idea of the one God, the creator, as well as the cosmology and view of mankind's early history, and also the distorted and somewhat misunderstood story of the old patriarchs, generals and kings whom he fused together one and all in the category of 'prophets'; finally as the last and most questionable element he borrowed the crippling ritualism. From Christianity he took over the figure of Jesus, not as the Son of God but merely as a prophet of miraculous birth, a miracle-worker, and as his own (Muhammad's) immediate predecessor. On the other hand, a closer knowledge not only of the dogma of the Trinity, the concept of salavation and of the Eucharist but also of the deeper ethical content of Christianity, eluded him. After all, he had only a vague oral information of its sources, the apocryphal gospels; still, wandering Christian preachers in the desert might have influenced his dialectic reasoning and the whole style of his proclamation." Glasenapp, too, considers Islam as an assimilated mixture of Christianity and Judaism. He maintains that the Jewish and Christian legends have been partly distorted in the 'Qur'an' as "the prophet had no biblical texts at hand, but only got to hear oral reports". Frank Thiess also believes Muhammad has produced the irrefutable proof "that new, significant, effective structures can be erected out of stones of old buildings, like churches out of heathen temples". (144:2) So this is the way the non-Muslim religious scholar conceives the birth of a religion which has lasted for centuries and has changed the world. But how strange that the amalgam of such disparate elements became so characteristic, peerless and full of vitality as to be capable of transforming its followers into such a specific and homogeneous type of people. In this context, let it be noted that the Baha'i Faith, too, when it is not bluntly dismissed as a reformed sect of Islam, is looked upon by religious historians as a syncretic formation. Rosenkranz has earnestly endeavoured to trace its alleged Greek-Neoplatonic-Islamic-Sufi origins. The theologian Willem Visser't Hooft regards the Baha'i Faith as the outcome of an artificial synthesis which in the end leaves nothing but an insignificant common denominator of all religions: "Baha'i is therefore a new, religious mixture which replaces the old religions."
(145:1)
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