gnostic
The Lost One
Muhammad didn't just adapt the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, but inserted some pre-Islamic Arabic religion into the abrahamic myths, like the jinns for example.
And not all the borrowing come from canonical texts.
The story of Solomon of being able to talk to animals or controlling winds, army of animals and jinns, come from Jewish folk legend that were commonly known among Jews at that time, that were recorded in midrash and aggadah. In the Jewish version, Solomon possessed a magic ring that enabled him to control demons, talk to or command animals to do his bidding.
A whole bunch of Jewish legends and folk tales, like that of Solomon, existed long before Muhammad, both orally and written, were meant to be told to children, just like any Western parents telling fairy tales to children before bedtime.
I find it odd that anyone would deny that the Qur'an didn't borrow any stories from the Jewish Tanakh or from th gospels. Just because Muhammad changed the stories to certain degrees, it doesn't mean he did use them for whatever warped agenda.
Even his story of meeting an angel in a cave is not an original one, and giving him knowledge or the so-called "prophethood". Muhammad's story bear striking resemblance to that of the prophet Jeremiah.
Both of them, the reluctant prophets, and unskilled - Muhammad unable to read and write, while Jeremiah was too young and inexperienced for public-speaking, and yet God passed on the knowledge to them in some unexpected ways.
The stories doesn't have to be exactly the same, and the Qur'an is not exact copy, but borrowing ideas and modifying them is the normal approach of starting a new religion.
And the Qur'an is not the only culprit for borrowing older existing myths. The folk tale of Muhammad's famous night journey that were narrated in one of the hadiths, in which ascended and witnessed multiple heavens, bear striking resemblance to the apocryphal "Ascension of Isaiah" (written at some times between 1st and 2nd centuries CE) or the more famous and earlier 2 Enoch (more briefly told in 1 Enoch). In Muhammad's version, it was a ridiculous magical flying steed that took him to 7 heavens, while it was angels that guided Isaiah to 7 heavens and Enoch to 10 heavens.
Just as Hebrew authors had borrowed the flood myth and Noah (Genesis) from the Babylonians (in which the Babylonian Utnapishtim was derived from older Akkadian Atrahasis, who in turn was derived from the original Sumerian Ziusudra). The Qur'an version of Noah (and flood) is clearly borrowed from the Genesis Noah, even though the details are not the same.
