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The most difficult task for us is to appreciate the strong appeal which the doctrines of incarnation and transmigration made to the Persian and Mesopotamian mind. Both these doctrines had figured prominently in pre-Islamic religions in Western Asia; and both recur in most religious movements from the coming of Islam to the present day in that particular area. We may note a few instances to illustrate this, and show incidentally the strong attraction these doctrines had for the Persian mind.

Abu Muslim was the general who more than any other helped to seat the ʿAbbasids on the throne, and suffered death at the hands of the first ʿAbbasid Khalif, who was jealous,—with good cause, it would appear,—of his excessive power. But Abu Muslim had exercised an extraordinary influence over men during life, and was treated as a quasi-divine hero after death, his admirers regarding him as not really dead but as having passed into “concealment,” some other having been miraculously substituted for him at the moment of execution. This resembles the theory which the pre-Islamic Persian teacher Mani held as to Christ. Mani fully accepted Christ as a religious teacher, side by side with Zoroaster and Buddha, but he could not admit the reality of his death, for a material body capable of death was in his view unworthy of one purely good. He supposed, therefore, that at the crucifixion Simon of Cyrene was at the last moment substituted for Christ, and this Persian idea has actually obtained a place in the Qurʾan (cf. Sura 4, 156).