He saw Jews, he liked it, he tried to recreate it.
There's a lot of truth in that.
I think mohammed is full of total bullshit from the start. I think he like all who created or started a religion saw an opportunity to control nitwits and ran with it. He knew damn well what he was doing! And the fact that he claims to have seen a christian angel means he stole popular folklore of the times.
... and a lot of truth in that too.
From what I've read, Mohammed was pissed off with the fragmented and fractious nature of tribal life in Arabia. In the trading centres he witnessed the solidarity and direction of other cultures, jews in particular and it is pretty obvious that he stole much of the practices from judaism to create his own vision of a religion suitable to Arabia that would unite the warring tribes and raise Arabia's culture to a social level that would gain respect on a parity with judaism etc. Practically, it took a long time to implement and he got a lot of shit wrong from the start, hence all the contradictions in the Qur'an as he rewrote stuff as he went along to try and shore up the holes in it, and eventually the notion of abrogation whereby Mohammed's later passages supersede previous passages on the same topic. While doing this he failed to realise that in having attributed the Qur'an to a direct revelation from Allah, the changes in law and need for abrogation lay bare the fact that Allah must have got shit wrong from the start. So much for an omniscient deity!
Anyway, it wasn't long before Mohammed became a totalitarian, mysogynistic warlord who demanded a 20% share of any war spoils from his followers when his bunch of thugs routed neighbouring tribes, jewish tribes in particular. And guess what?... whenever Mo clapped his eyes on a nice young girl that he wanted to add to his collection, he always got a sudden revelation from Allah that allowed for this to happen, despite the face that other guys were only allowed 4 wives. Funny, that.....

Apparently there is a specific type of temporal lobe epilepsy that causes people to have intensely spiritual experiences.
Yes indeed. And it is now possible to induce that very experience into anyone by stimulating the temporal lobe of the brain. That made me laugh - the notion of religious experience being a form of 'mental illness' is not one that will be popular! However, I love it... :fU: