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DIVISION II

THE MOHAMMEDAN PERIOD

CHAPTER I

THE RISE AND SPREAD OF MOHAMMEDANISM

 

(a) Sale's Koran. Original authorities; traditions collected by Zohri, Musa ibn Ochba and Abn Mashar; followed by Ibn Ishæ, Ibn Hisham, Wakidy, Tabari, Ibn Athir, whose works are extant more or less in their original state; Michael the Syrian (edit. and French trans. by Chabot, 1899–1907).

(b) Muir, Life of Mahomet, 3rd ed. 1894; The Caliphate, Its Rise, Decline, and Fall, 3rd ed. 1898; R. Bosworth Smith, Lectures on Mohammedanism, 2nd ed. 1876; Butler, Arab Conquest of Egypt, 1902; Sprenger, Das Leben und die Lehre Mohammad, 1869; Weil, Einleitung in den Koran, 2nd ed. 1878.

 

Our familiar Western division of Church History into three periods—the Patristic, the Mediæval, and the Modern—does not rightly apply to the Eastern half of Christendom. There were no Middle Ages in the Oriental Churches, for the simple reason that there was no Renaissance or Reformation to inaugurate a third period from which those ages could be sharply divided—no terminus ad quem. Nevertheless, other events roughly mark off a corresponding block of time. In the West the chief cause of the immense change that broke the classic traditions of the past and introduced mediævalism was the Teutonic flood of colonisation, before which half the Roman Empire crumbled away, and which ultimately issued in the shaping of the nations

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