Geiger, Prize Essay upon the question, proposed by
the University of Bonn, "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthum
aufgenommen?"

2 Merrick, Translation of the Sheeah Traditions of Mohammed in the
Hyat ul Kuloob, note x.

Sunnee are found a multitude of petty sects, separated from each
other on various questions of speculative faith and ceremonial
practice. Some take the Koran alone, and that in its plain literal
sense, as their authority. Others read the Koran in the
explanatory light of a vast collection of parables, proverbs,
legends, purporting to be from Mohammed. There is no less than a
score of mystic allegorizing sects3 who reduce almost every thing
in the Koran to symbol, or spiritual signification, and some of
whom as the Sufis are the most rapt and imaginative of all the
enthusiastic devotees in the world.

A cardinal point in the Mohammedan faith is the asserted existence
of angels, celestial and infernal. Eblis is Satan. He was an angel
of lofty rank; but when God created Adam and bade all the angels
worship him, Eblis refused, saying, "I was created of fire, he of
clay: I am more excellent and will not bow to him."4 Upon this God
condemned Eblis and expelled him from Paradise. He then became the
unappeasable foe and seducing destroyer of men. He is the father
of those swarms of jins, or evil spirits, who crowd all hearts and
space with temptations and pave the ten thousand paths to hell
with lures for men.

The next consideration preliminary to a clear exhibition of our
special subject, is the doctrine of predestination, the
unflinching fatalism which pervades and crowns this religion. The
breath of this appalling faith is saturated with fatality, and its
very name of Islam means "Submission." In heaven the prophet saw a
prodigious wax tablet, called the "Preserved Table," on which were
written the decrees of all events between the morning of creation
and the day of judgment. The burning core of Mohammed's preaching
was the proclamation of the one true God whose volition bears the
irresistible destiny of the universe; and inseparably associated
with this was an intense hatred of idolatry, fanned by the wings
of God's wrath and producing a fanatic sense of a divine
commission to avenge him on his insulters and vindicate for him
his rightful worship from every nation. There is an apparent
conflict between the Mohammedan representations of God's absolute
predestination of all things, and the abundant ex