obligations arising from blood-relationship or ownership were regulated.
These points suffice to remind us of the nature of the Qorânic regulations.
Reference to certain subjects in this revealed law while others were
ignored, did not depend on their respective importance to the life of the
community, but rather on what happened to have been suggested by the events
in Mohammed's lifetime. For Mohammed knew too well how little qualified he
was for legislative work to undertake it unless absolutely necessary.

This rough sketch of what Islâm meant when it set out to conquer the world,
is not very likely to create the impression that its incredibly rapid
extension was due to its superiority over the forms of civilization which
it supplanted. Lammens's assertion, that Islâm was the Jewish religion
simplified according to Arabic wants and amplified by some Christian and
Arabic traditions, contains a great deal of truth, if only we recognize the
central importance for Mohammed's vocation and preaching of the Christian
doctrine of Resurrection and judgment. This explains the large number of
weak points that the book of Mohammed's revelations, written down by his
first followers, offered to Jewish and Christian polemics. It was easy for
the theologians of those religions to point out numberless mistakes in the
work of the illiterate Arabian prophet, especially where he maintained that
he was repeating and confirming the contents of their Bible. The Qorânic
revelations about Allah's intercourse with men, taken from apocryphal
sources, from profane legends like that of Alexander the Great, sometimes
even created by Mohammed's own fancy--such as the story of the prophet
Sâlih, said to have lived in the north of Arabia, and that of the prophet
Hûd, supposed to have lived in the south; all this could not but give them
the impression of a clumsy caricature of true tradition. The principal
doctrines of Synagogue and Church had apparently been misunderstood, or
they were simply denied as corruptions.