TheTorah posts about prostration in Judaism. Once upon a time Judaism was an Oriental religion; Orientals do kowtow. The Romans and Greeks had a tradition of personal or at least familial/political independence. Upon taking the Orient, first the Greeks and then the Romans accepted some Oriental practice. Some Orientals under their sway bent the knee to them. Others figured they should reserve this to G-d.
Judaism went in the other direction - the Western direction, yea even unto their Lord. How they went, is the debate. Jews in the Iranians' Eraq - like Hidyab / Adiabene - maintained a culture of kowtow, for more practices. Western Jews abandoned kowtow; one presumes that so did Samaritans.
We Catholics, thoroughly Western and Latin, have the priest kowtow only on Easter and Christmas as far as I know. Maybe monasteries do more. The congregation doesn't do it; we've designed our pews not to allow it. We do kneel and bow; but in Arabic that is only ruku', not sajda.
So - um. Arabic! Their religious sites were masgida in Aramaic transcription as witnessed in Greek and Georgian, from the start. "Place of prostration"; not "marki'a". If Western Jews weren't doing sajda and Western Christians were doing it only sparingly - whence the idea?
I suspect the Muslims inherited it from the Yemen, maybe that Eraq. Yemen had a Sasanian occupation, when it wasn't under the thumb of Axsum. Neither of these nations were keeping up with Roman or Greek fashions.
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