A Third Universal Religious System Emerges
Around 610 A.D., Muhammad began receiving the revelations that would later be collected in the Qur’an.
Within a few decades, the movement that began in Arabia became a religious, political, and military power extending across large territories formerly dominated by Christian and Jewish communities.
Islam presented itself as a restoration of the faith of Abraham. It recognized many figures already known from the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian tradition: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Mary, and Jesus. Yet their stories entered Islam through a world already shaped by centuries of Jewish, Christian, Greek, and later interpretive traditions.
Islam did not arise in isolation.
By 610 A.D., the original Hebrew revelation had already passed through the Greek environment of the Septuagint. Christianity had already transformed Jesus into the center of a philosophical and imperial religious system. Councils had defined doctrine, bishops had acquired political authority, and competing interpretations had been condemned as heresy.
Islam entered this already altered religious world.
It rejected several Christian doctrines, including the Trinity and the divine sonship of Jesus. In this respect, it challenged the metaphysical Christianity created by the councils. It insisted that God is one and that Jesus was a prophet and messenger rather than God Himself.
Yet Islam did not simply return to the original revelation.
It created another universal religious system built around a sacred book, a prophetic authority, a defined community, religious law, doctrinal submission, and eventually political expansion.
Judaism had preserved revelation within a national structure.
Christianity had transformed it into an imperial religion.
Islam now presented another universal system claiming to restore and complete the revelations that came before it.
In my interpretation, 610 A.D. corresponds to the Third Trumpet and to the opening of the Black Horse, representing the rise of Dogmatism.
Dogmatism does not mean merely believing something strongly. It begins when a religious system declares that truth has been permanently fixed inside an authoritative structure and that questioning its interpretation becomes disobedience to God.
The book becomes inseparable from the institution interpreting it.
Submission replaces investigation.
Uniformity replaces personal responsibility.
Islam developed a powerful legal and communal order capable of uniting peoples across language, ethnicity, and territory. This gave it strength and historical continuity. But the same structure could also place divine authority behind political rule, religious law, military power, and the control of conscience.
This was not entirely new.
Imperial Christianity had already joined doctrine with state authority. The Papacy had already claimed the right to define truth and punish dissent. Islam continued the same larger historical movement in another form.
The names, rituals, and doctrines differed.
The principle remained familiar: a universal religious system claimed the authority to speak for God and organize society according to an officially defined revelation.
Islam therefore became the third great religious structure formed within the world created by the meeting of biblical tradition and Hellenistic universalism:
- the Greek transformation of Jewish revelation;
- the philosophical and imperial transformation of Christianity;
- the Islamic reconstruction of both into a new religious civilization.
This does not mean that everything within Islam came from Greek philosophy or Christianity. Arabia had its own language, traditions, conflicts, and religious environment. But Islam inherited a world in which revelation had already been translated, interpreted, systematized, and transformed into universal religious authority.
The rise of Islam also permanently changed the political map.
Christian territories in the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia passed under Muslim rule. Jerusalem entered another religious framework. The Mediterranean world became divided among competing civilizations, each claiming connection with Abraham and the one God.
Yet all three systems carried layers of interpretation accumulated after the original revelation.
610 A.D. therefore marks more than the beginning of another religion.
It marks the rise of a third universal system claiming final authority over revelation, law, worship, and human society.
Christianity had not succeeded in restoring the message of Jesus.
Islam arose in response—but it created another dogmatic order rather than returning humanity directly to the source.