Christians and Jews often taunted the Arabs about their polytheistic beliefs and their lack of an overarching creed and an afterlife. Consequently, a sense of religious inferiority arose among the desert dwellers, along with a pent-up desire for a comprehensive belief system of their own.

The incense trade catalyzed the birth of Islam, whose military, spiritual, and commercial impacts transformed medieval Asia, Europe, and Africa. Riding on a rising tide of global trade along the land and sea routes of Asia, Islam came to dominate that continent's spiritual as well as its commercial life.

Chinese sources suggest that Islam arrived in Canton in about 620, a full dozen years before the death of the Prophet.

The coming of the Prophet would sweep away this fragmented and pluralistic pattern of trade in the ancient world. Within a few centuries of Muhammad's death, one culture, one religion, and one law would unify the commerce of the Old World's three continents nearly a millennium before the arrival of the first European ships in the East.