A rhetorical license authorized blaming Muhammad without needing evidence against him

Evidence

According to popular opinion, there was a man, whose name, if I have it right, was Mathomus, who led them [the Orientals] away from belief in the Son and the Holy Spirit. He taught them to acknowledge only the person of the Father as the single, creating God, and he said that Jesus was entirely human. To sum up his teachings, having decreed circumcision, he gave them free rein for every kind of shameful behavior. … One may safely speak ill of a man whose malignity transcends and surpasses whatever evil can be said about him. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 728

Categorization

• DEFINE: This passage wraps the earliest straw-man portrait of Muhammad in an explicit theory of polemical license — ‘one may safely speak ill’ of a figure whose evil is already assumed beyond measurement.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the mechanics of polemic-as-epistemology where the enemy’s badness is assumed before evidence is gathered. — connects to: Savarkar’s rhetoric manufactured conviction from passion without evidence — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1168; Court hearings can launder Islamophobic tropes into reusable official legal texts — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 390