Prosthetic Conscience wrote:Ignoring your fantasy about the origins of Islam, what you write doesn't even make sense. How are origins in a sect you claim shunned everyone else "cosmopolitan"? Is it just that you automatically associate the word "cosmopolitan" with Jews, and think that therefore it must be something people are ashamed of?
When the Arabs captured Jerusalem in 637, they set up worship on the Temple mount. The exact nature of the their religion is not clear and was not clear to observers at the time. The indications suggest that the Arabs prayed towards Jerusalem. The Arabs may well have come from the South, but they may have come from the East as well. The origins of the Koran and the first Arab invaders relationship to the Koran, whether it had been written in 637 again are not clear.
What we can say with reasonable confidence is that the earliest Arabs followed some form of Judaism, but exactly how far it had diverged from the rest of Judaism is again not clear. Its possible that there was some kind of alliance of Jews and Arabs. But later Arabs did become ashamed of their Jewish origins and sought to cover up by the invention of the Meccan origin story. Christianity went through a somewhat similar process of distancing itself from Judaism, rewriting and reinventing its origin stories multiple times. Christianity also used the trope of desert purity counter posed to cosmopolitan corruption.