A thirteenth-century Dominican friar praised Muslim learning while calling Islam a perfidious law

Evidence

This city, Baghdad, is the center and capital of the Saracens, both in terms of their education and religion and in terms of their political power… . There the Saracens have their greatest universities [maxima studia] and their great teachers. There are many Saracen clerics [religiosi] there. Their different sects convene there. There one finds the great monasteries of the Saracens, called mujarrad, which means contemplatives. When I wanted to eliminate the perfidy of Muhammad, seeking to assault them in their capital and in the place of their university, I needed to converse with them at times; they received me as if I were an angel of God—in their schools, classrooms, monasteries, churches or synagogues, and in their homes. And I payed close attention to their law and their works; I was astounded at how, in such a perfidious law, one could find works of such great perfection. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1246

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the broader pattern in this book of Christian polemicists acknowledging Saracen cultural and scholarly achievements even as they attack the religion.
• SHARE: Riccoldo the Dominican, a crusade-era Christian, called Baghdad’s learned men his intellectual equals and marveled at their theological works — a needle to share with anyone studying interfaith encounter in the medieval Mediterranean.
• SEED: Article angle: how Europe’s earliest serious Islamic scholarship grew out of polemic — people got to know the enemy precisely to ‘assault them in their capital.’