that impulse—if indeed Islam did convey it to the Arabs of the desert. If, however, remembering the strength of the convention under which the Arab poets composed, we bring together the objects connected with Christianity of which in poems of undisputed genuineness they show knowledge, it amounts to a good deal. Pere Cheikho ¹ has collected a great mass of material in this connection. He is rather uncritical. But he has, I think, brought together enough to show that the Aramaic language of Eastern Christianity had supplied the Arabs with a large number of religious terms. If we take only those which have long been recognised as derived from Aramaic and which belong to the ancient language we find that they show knowledge of Christian churches (bi'a, kanisa); of images in the churches (dumya, sera); of various grades of the hierarchy (qasis, etc.); of Christian festivals, including the Easter festival. They could hardly have known about these things without some knowledge, external it may be, of the ideas which lay behind them. The monk, as I have said, especially impressed them, and while they borrowed Aramaic names for him they also used much more commonly the pure Arabic term rahib. This comes from a root meaning "to fear", and we may, I think, argue from that, that the Arabs did realise something of the motive behind the withdrawal of these men from the world and connected it with an intense fear of God. We have seen, too, that there are frequent references to

the books of the monks, and the Arabs could not have witnessed Christian services without knowing that Christians cherished and founded their religion upon a revealed book, though they may not have had much knowledge of what that book contained. How important that was for the enterprise which Muhammad undertook we shall see in the next lecture.

We might also, I think, take as evidence of Aramaic, and Abyssinian, Christian influence in Arabia some of the words borrowed from these sources which Muhammad uses in the Qur'an even when they cannot be shown with certainty to have been in use before his time. He may, of course, have directly adopted them. He had rather a liking for introducing unfamiliar words some of which he explains, others of which he leaves unexplained, a certain obscurity being appropriate to a divine revelation. But I incline to think that a good number of the words of foreign origin which he uses were not directly borrowed by him ; that words like salat ("prayer" or rather "divine service"), sabbih ("ascribe glory to"), tazakka (in the sense of "to seek purity" with the connotation of doing so by giving alms), 'abd (in the sense of "a worshipper"), qara' (in the sense of "to read" or "recite solemnly"), and perhaps even qur'an itself, were ready to his hand, and, if not quite commonly understood, were at least in use. When he challenges his opponents that if they do not accept the divine origin of his Qur'an they should produce a surah like it,¹ he must have been using