Machine summary:
That, in the course of the life we know him to have led, our Prophet could have becorne acquainted with so vast a field of learning· as that covered by the alleged " sources ,, seems to us harder to accept than the claim of divine revelation ; though it does not, in point of fact, preclude that claim.
has prevailed from the third Islamic century onward, in all its variant forms, has little in common with that of the first Muslims, He quotes the words of the Qur'an: ~' Say (0 Muhammad}: I am only a mortal like you", asagainst the conception of the Prophet as the Perfect Man (Al• insanu'l-Kamil) and universal exemplar.
author describes has taken place, and has occasionally been carried to quite un-Islamic lengths; and it is prob• ably true, as Mr. Andree suggests, that only the object• Iesson cf Christianity and certain plain commands of the Qur'fm and of the Prophet l:iin1self have prevented some -:i\Iuslims from deifying the Prophet.
VV e refer to such · extreme expressions of devotion as seem almost to have passed the bounds impos• ed on Muslim reverence, among which we do not include the Sufist theory of Al-Insanu'l-l(an1il which appears to us to have a perfectly legitimate origin in certain texts of · the Qur'fin and certain well-known sayings of the Prophet.
In the works of other Orientalists we have come upon passages in which the writer seems to imply that he considers certain later imitations-s-the so-called " revelations " of :;.