For a large number of scholars, a plausible hypothesis is that much, if not all, of the Quranic material predates Muhammad and that it is liturgical material used in some community of possibly Judeo-Christian, and certainly monotheist, Arabs, and that is why by the time the Muslims got around to writing their commentaries on the Quran, they did not have the faintest idea what large parts of this material meant, and were forced to invent some absurd explanations for these obscurities, but it all eventually got collected together as the Arabian book of God, in order to forge a specifically Arabian religious identity.
