We also know at this time that Muhammad had exposure to other religions, some of which had penetrated the various tribes of Arabia. Most notably, you have Christianity, and Muhammad's wife's cousin was in fact a Christian, and you also have Judaism, these two clearly being related religions, Christianity coming out of a Jewish tradition. We also know that the two great empires here, the Byzantines and Persian empires, are in constant conflict, and in fact, the Arabs and many in the Middle East are the pawns in that conflict, and so you have the Byzantines versus the Persians, with a possibility of those living in their lands might not have been happy with either. There's also the sense that we're at the very beginning of a long decline for the Byzantine Empire. So one thesis could be that Muhammad was able to bring many of the ideas of Christianity and Judaism, but these ideas helped to unify a fragmented Arab people, and not only did it unify them, but it gave them the energy that you can have through religious zeal, and that energy is what allowed them not only to unify in Arabia, and they're able to unify most of Arabia by the time of Muhammad's death, but within 100 years of his death, they're able to take over the entire Sassanid Empire and make major inroads into the Byzantine Empire, and so one argument might be, and I encourage you to argue with me, that they were unified, they had this missionary zeal, which perhaps was only seen in Christianity before Islam, and they were able to take advantage of conflict and discontent between the Byzantines and Persians in order to spread. Now another question is, do we see any patterns here? Are there any other examples in history of this happening?