I’ve been typing non-stop for several hours now, so my fingers are quite cramped, but I’ll come back here and give one of my famous systematic expositions of the subject strung out over two or three maximum-length posts when I’ve recovered.
In short: all of the Jewish and Christian prophets were incorporated and then retconned to supposedly be “prophets of Islam” in an attempt to co-opt the Jewish and Christian histories for the nascent Islamic community, as pre-Islamic Arabia had no monotheistic history or history of revealed religion: just Paganism, no precedent. Muhammad originally held himself out as a continuation of the line of Judaeo-Christian prophets (Muhammad’s movement was originally one of Messianic Judaism) as is evidenced in some of the early traditions, but when it became obvious the Christians would not convert and the Jews would not regard him as anything other than a false prophet, his attitude changed, and he needed to create a separate, Ishmaelite line of prophets to legitimize his claim, a line parallel to the Israelite line of the Jews and Christians, to effect a complete and final break from Judaism and a justification/rationalization for it in the eyes of his followers to try to save a little face.
Three good books that expand upon this at length and give great references: **Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World **by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, The Sectarian Milieu: the Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History by John Wansbrough, and Slaves on Horses: the Evolution of the Islamic Polity by Patricia Crone.
Additionally, **The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: a Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran **by Christoph Luxenberg is excellent, showing, through the methods of textual criticism, the origins of many parts of the Koran in Syriac lectionaries, legends, and religious sources, which ties in well with the three former books, as the book was created over time by several people to provide an equivalent Scripture to the Torah and the “Injil” (the Islamic word for Muhammad’s mistaken belief that Jesus was given a specific, written revelation all recorded in one book, likely spurred by his contact with Tatian’s Diatessaron, which was the standard even for Christians in the Syriac church of the time; the word itself is a corruption of the Greek euaggelion) for the nascent “Hagarene” community (the interim community of former Jewish messianists who had broken with the Jews) to cement in it a religious identity that allowed it to become “Muslim”.
As I said, I’ll come back and give it a much more thorough treatment in a bit, but I, here, will be unable to give it nearly as much of a just, accurate, scholarly and full treatment as the books I have above listed, which are mandatory reading for anyone interested in the early Islamic history and such questions as, “Why did Islam attempt to co-opt the Judaeo-Christian prophets and rewrite their histories, add apocryphal legends, and then claim to have the original?” (part of the answer is, “in the beginning, they weren’t attempting to claim they had the original; the elements taken from the Talmud are consistent with a Judaic movement”).
