User blog comment:LurkerLordB/Religion in a world without Christianity/@comment-1777104-20120424214749/@comment-1630894-20120425023147

That source seems somewhat biased towards Islam, IMO, as it keeps mentioning that before Islam there was great immorality. But anyways, all people who are Arabs are Semitic, it is only recently that such a term has been applied exclusively to the Jews. Rastafarianism relies mostly on the Old Testament, claiming that the New Testament's message has been altered, yet to say that it would arise without Christianity is untrue.

Would Judaism, and the monotheistic ideas of the hanifs, had become so prominent without Christianity? The Romans had been Christian for two centuries before this, and Christian and gnostic thought had seeped into Arabia from the bordering Romans even before then. Also, the Christian kingdom of Aksum ruled much of the Red Sea coast, and parts of Arabia, prior to Islam's rise. Furthermore, with many gnostics claiming that the words of the Bible were untrue or distorted, or that there were secret writings, the idea of a non-Biblical religion could have come from Christian thought.

Furthermore (at least according to Wikipedia), the Jewish religion had risen in prominence in Arabia due to the kingdom of Kindah, whose conversion was inspired by the conversion of the Himyarites to Judaism. The Himyarites themselves converted due to pressures towards monotheism from Christianity and Zoroastrianism (again, according to Wikipedia). With only Zoroastrianism, would the Himyarites have been as pressured? And without Christianity, would they have been as exposed to Jewish ideas?