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In Mecca, this was a far more revolutionary proposal than it would have been elsewhere in the pagan world. Polytheism was at the heart of Mecca's economic and social life. If Mecca took a strong stand for a particular god, Mecca's pilgrim business would die. The practical choice for Mecca was polytheism or, if it elected monotheism, the political conquest of all Arabia and the imposition of its one-God religion. To a man, the Mec can leaders rejected Mohammed. But he persisted even after he gradually came to realize that his spiritual kingdom did not have a of of spreading unless it also achieved a kingdom of this world. The political crisis of Christianity had not come until the 4th Century with the conversion of Constantine; Islam's political crisis, confronting Mohammed at the start of his mission, colored all his teaching and all the subsequent his tory of Islam. Separation of God and Caesar, church and state, would always be alien and painful to Islam. Islam would always be as much a way of organizing society as it was a way of worshiping God.
A Practical Man
For 20 years Mohammed, with a handful of followers, struggled vainly in Mecca to convince the town leaders that there was no God but Allah. During these years he began to produce the Koran, which he said was not written by him but by God, and transmitted to him by the Angel Gabriel.
To 20th Century unbelievers the Koran seems a most uneven book; ethical and religious ideas of a high order sparkle amid dreary ruminations of a desert Dorothy Dix. Yet among Mo hammed's contemporaries (and among Arabs today) the style of the Koran was considered superb.
The main religious influences on Mohammed were Jewish and Christian. From time to time, God sent prophets to warn mankind against idolatry. Abraham and Christ were two of the greatest; Mohammed was the last, "the Seal of the Prophets." He considered his teaching very close to Christianity, completely missed Christianity's key point: the Divine Redeemer.
A practical businessman, Mohammed believed in success. He thought that he was defending the Christians against the Jews when he asserted that the Christians invented the story of the Crucifixion, which he regarded as a shameful end for a great prophet. Christ, he said, actually slipped away to heaven and another man was crucified in his place.
Judgment Day
The difference between monotheism and polytheism is not just a matter of arithmetic. Polytheism assumes several divine wills, divergent, possibly conflicting. The polytheist is not surprised the world seems capricious, illogical, anarchic. The man who says there is one God also says that there is one divine will and one truth. Nature, somehow, must make sense. Men are obliged to obey God's law.