Mr Tide, Correct me if I’m wrong. Abraham had 2 sons, Issac was born of Sarah, then Jacob/Israel was born, and from this line came the Jewish people.
But Abraham, fearing that he’d never have children that number more than sands, hooked up with Haggi. Haggi had a son named Ishmael. I thought that the Muslims come from a line of bastards, for lack of better term, piss be on them.
So before Mohammed had his visions, what did Haggi’s people believe?
He had two sons, the first named Ishmael, a bastard by a slave girl named Hagar. A sort of third century BC surrogate mother selected by Abraham’s wife Sarah to provide her husband with an heir since she was far too old. That son was the progenitor of the Arabs. Then miraculously Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac, a legitimate son, who was the father of Jacob and grandfather of the twelve tribes of Israel (Jacob and Israel were one and the same person). Hagar and Ishmael were cast out but survived in the desert by the express grace of God. So according to the Torah Jews and Arabs are cousins descended from half brothers and a single Patriarch.
Arabia at the time of Mohammed was home to countless religions and his home city, Mecca, was a pilgrimage center for most of them. The city was a pantheopolis with dozens of temples and shrines of various pagan flavors. It was that city's chief "industry", tourist draw, and big business, which Mohammed began to disrupt when he started preaching that they were all wrong and that there was really only one God.
It's certain that he acquired that idea from Jews living in Mecca and from them he also gained a very distorted version of the Torah. From local Christians he likewise heard of Jesus. By twisting the stories we know from the Bible (all decidedly committed to parchment and papyrus by the 600's AD) he preached and preached until the city fathers had had enough and plotted to kill him. He escaped to the nearby city of Medina where he continued to preach and gather together a military force to go back and take Mecca.
Thus, he went from an interested observer of Judaism and Christianity, to a wannabe new prophet of "The God" (what the word "Allah" literally means in Arabic), to refugee, to warlord. In the last pose he had entire villages and towns destroyed, the men massacred and the women and children enslaved. The Arabs, being a warlike tribe to begin with, converted en masse and became for a hundred years an all conquering army sweeping though everything from Persia through Egypt to the Pyrenees, always and till now converting by extortion and the edge of a sword.