Page:Early Christianity in Arabia.djvu/174

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162
EARLY CHRISTIANITY

If we consult the opinions of the Moslem on the subject of the Koran, we shall find them as unintelligible and incoherent as the work itself. One tells us that it contains sixty thousand miracles;[1] another that it is itself a miracle greater even than that of raising the dead to life;[2] and all true believers were compelled to acknowledge that it was uncreate, and had been in existence long before the creation of the world.[3] When we turn to the Christian writers, we find many of their opinions equally inconsistent, and scarcely more satisfactory;[4] but presuming on this reputed ignorance of the impostor, they have generally agreed in assigning to him at least an assistant in its composition. Muhammed himself complains that on their first publication, some had attributed his Korans to human authority, and even intimates that a stranger was the object of their suspicions, and the argument by which he repels the

    But H. von Einem does not appear to have considered that each Sura was originally a separate Koran, and therefore that one Koran might without impropriety be mentioned and extolled in another.

  1. Al Janabi, ap. Maracci, Vit. Moham. p. 43.
  2. Ahmed ibn Abdolhalim, ibid.
  3. Maracci, p. 44.
  4. Maracci piously thinks that it may be the production of the devil, who appeared to Muhammed in the shape of an angel. Est enim locutio Alcoranica valde similis illi qua utuntur dæmones in energumenis, vel arreptitiis, vel quando se ab hominibus audiri sinunt. (p. 41). Maracci lived in a superstitious age, and we must pardon his want of judgment, and excuse his credulity.