A deformed image of Islam hardened in the medieval Christian mind as dogma

Evidence

This, then, is the period with which I am concerned, and my subject is the absorption of Christian traditions of Islam already existing, and their development into a new body of opinion. At a time when the Byzantine Empire was politically and militarily infirm, and was itself the object of Western aggression and Western polemic, when the Muslims were at many points upon the frontiers of Latin Christendom, and shared with Christendom the inland sea, the deformed image of Islam was established in the conscious European mind. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 78

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the vault claim that ‘Islam’ is constituted as the West’s constitutive outside — this is the historical origin moment of that construction, complementing Aziz’s Racial Muslim and Razack’s Casting Out. — connects to: Dante’s contradictory treatment of Muslims reflects a transitional medieval-to-humanist ideological moment — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 774
• DEFINE: Defines the book’s core object: not ‘Islam’ itself but the communal Christian image of Islam that became dogma.