Jefnvk, more than you might realize. The Qu'ran, technically, is never written. The book is a
transcription of the Qu'ran. The word means "recitation." Some of his recitations were written during his lifetime, but records are sketchy. So sketchy, in fact, that the entire Qu'ran is thoroughly disorganized. It is not arranged in a literary order, but by the length of the suras.
Arabs prior to Muhammed had varying beliefs..mostly pantheistic
Sorta. The Arabs that Muhammad was after didn't just worship gods in the all-powerful yet etherial sense. They worshipped megaliths, too. You might know of one, it's called the Ka'aba. It's the big stone thing they walk in circles around. Muhammad was smart enough to retain some of the old elements, just like Christianity maintains a number of elements of Orphism. It's easier to sell when it's somewhat familiar. He also retained the supreme God Al'lah, and his
wife Al'lat. The Ka'aba is her shrine, not Al'lah's. The priests at her shrine were known as her "sons" even in the Islamic tradition. Of course, she got edited out later.
Mohamed was a merchant and traveled with the Christians
Gnostic Christians. It's an important distinction. Most modern Christians wouldn't recognize a Gnostic (no value judgement implied, they're just that different). Muhammad saw that the Christians and Jews were organized and productive. The Arabs were decidedly not so. Muhammad became disillusioned with the Arabs, and retreated to a cave on Mt. Hira to meditate on the problem. It was there, in 610, that Gabriel appeared to him and gave him the Qu'ran.
It should be noted that the Qu'ran was thoroughly gutted around 651 by caliph Uthman who didn't care for this upstart religion. He revised the book to make it more acceptable. Islam does revere Mary, but the revised book is rather unfair when it comes to women, so she is not venerated in the text as perhaps she should be (or was in the original). For the record, Muhammad was decidedly not a mysoginist. That descends from the fine Persian tradition of treating women as property. It's a cultural thing, not a religious thing.
All this talk you hear about Shari'a is poppycock. It came along more than a hundred years later, and the guy who supposedly got all of it from the Qu'ran got his head chopped off for fabricating his source material. How's
that, Dan Rather... You will also find the line "The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr." in The Qu'ran.
