Eastern Christianity. Together with Jewish, Greek and classical ideas
were also naturally operative, while Persian and other ancient
Oriental conceptions were transmitted to Islam by Christianity: these
instances I have collectively termed Christian because Christianity
then represented the whole of later classical intellectualism, which
influenced Islam for the most part through Christianity.

It seems that the communication of these ideas to Muhammedanism was
impeded by the necessity of translating them not only into a kindred
language, but into one of wholly different linguistic structure. For
Muhammedanism the difficulty was lessened by the fact that it had
learned Christianity in Syria and Persia through the Semitic dialect
known as Aramaic, by which Greek and Persian culture had been
transmitted to the Arabs before the rise of Islam. In this case, as in
many others, the history of language runs on parallel lines with the
history of civilisation. The necessities of increasing civilisation
had introduced many Aramaic words to the Arabic vocabulary before
Muhammed's day: these importations increased considerably when the
Arabs entered a wider and more complex civilisation and were
especially considerable where intellectual culture was concerned. Even
Greek terms made their way into Arabic through Aramaic. This natural
dependency of Arabic upon Aramaic, which in turn was connected with
Greek as the rival Christian vernacular in these regions, is alone
sufficient evidence that Christianity exerted a direct influence upon
Muhammedanism. Moreover, as we have seen, the Qoran itself regarded
Christians as being in possession of divine wisdom, and some reference
both to Christianity and to Judaism was necessary to explain the many
unintelligible passages of the Qoran. Allusions were made to texts and
statements in the Thora and the Gospels, and God was represented as
constantly appealing to earlier revelations of Himself. Thus it was