Islam the Religion of Submission to the Will of Allah

Abstract

Of the three monotheistic religions developed by the Semites, the Islam of the Koran is the most characteristic and comes nearer the Judaism of the Old Testament than does the Christianity of the New Testament. It has such close affinities with both, however, that in the conception of many medieval European and Oriental Christians it stood as a heretic Christian sect rather than a distinct religion. In his Divine Comedy Dante consigns Muhammad to one of the lower hells with all those “sowers of scandals and schism”. Gradually Islam developed into an independent and distinct system of belief. The Ka‘bah and Quraysh were the determining factors in this new orientation.