John of Damascus credited an Arian monk, not God, with shaping Islam

Evidence

During the reign of Heraclius, he continues, “a false prophet appeared among them, surnamed Mamed ( ´), who, having casually been exposed to the Old and the New Testament and supposedly encountered an Arian monk, formed a heresy of his own.” This “Arian monk” is no doubt meant to be Bahira, who, rather than merely recognizing the prophet’s divine mission, seems to play a role in the formation of the prophet’s “heresy.” John makes him an Arian heretic in order the better to discredit Islam by associating it with familiar errors already attacked in previous chapters of Against the Heresies. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 346

Categorization

• SEED: Trope-genealogy angle: the claim that Muhammad was tutored by a wayward Christian monk (Bahira turned ‘Arian heretic’) is the ancestor of modern claims that Islam is human-contrived — a garbled borrowing from Christian heresy, not revelation.