A single polemical source distorted Latin Europe’s entire picture of Muhammad

Evidence

Yet Latin readers depended on him for their facts, and so many important events, undoubtedly known to, but not mentioned by, him, they never learned. Moreover, they were unable to check or confirm the facts that they did learn from the Risalah, since it was usually their sole source of information about them. What in the Arabic was really a critical appraisal of events had now to serve in the place of a straightforward recital of them. If the Arabic condemned the acts of the Companions as robbery, European readers understood that Muhammad literally gathered together a band of ‘profane men, highwaymen, plunderers, murderers and robbers’ and terrorised the countryside. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 532

Categorization

• XREF: The single-source distortion problem mirrors the information-cost analysis in Milgrom’s work on how institutions transmit knowledge — and parallels modern echo-chamber research. — connects to: Carlyle reversed every traditional European view of Muhammad as voluptuary and swordsman.
• SEED: Angle: ‘When one biased source shapes an entire civilization’s understanding’ — the transmission-loss problem in cross-cultural knowledge, medieval to modern.