of obligatory fasting depends on the Christian usage.

Mohammed's fragmentary and unsystematic accounts of sacred history were
freely drawn from Jewish and Christian sources and covered the whole period
from the creation of the world until the first centuries of the Christian
era. Of course, features shocking to the Moslim mind were dropped and the
whole adapted to the monotonous conception of the Qorân. With ever greater
boldness the story of Mohammed's own life was exalted to the sphere of
the supernatural; here the Gospel served as example. Though Mohammed had
repeatedly declared himself to be an ordinary man chosen by Allah as the
organ of His revelation, and whose only miracle was the Qorân, posterity
ascribed to him a whole series of wonders, evidently invented in emulation
of the wonders of Christ. The reason for this seems to have been the idea
that none of the older prophets, not even Jesus, of whom the Qorân tells
the greatest wonders, could have worked a miracle without Mohammed, the
Seal of the prophets, having rivalled or surpassed him in this respect.
Only Jesus was the Messiah; but this title did not exceed in value
different titles of other prophets, and Mohammed's special epithets were
of a higher order. A relative sinlessness Mohammed shared with Jesus; the
acceptance of this doctrine, contradictory to the original spirit of the
Qorân, had moreover a dogmatic motive: it was considered indispensable
to raise the text of the Qorân above all suspicion of corruption, which
suspicion would not be excluded if the organ of the Revelation were
fallible.

This period of naively adopting institutions, doctrines, and traditions was
soon followed by an awakening to the consciousness that Islâm could not
well absorb any more of such foreign elements without endangering its
independent character. Then a sorting began; and the assimilation of the
vast amount of borrowed matter, that had already become an integral part of