A translator assumed moral Muslims must secretly be anti-Islamic Christians.

Evidence

At first he felt that the author must be Christian, but reflected that ‘whatsoever is here alledged and layd down, though never so good and Christianlike; or contrariwise absurd and monstrous; is nevertheless found and read in that their law’; moreover, he knew for a fact that Muslims compose ‘the like morall sayings and zealous exhortations unto vertue, and holinesse of life’. So he changed his mind; in other words, he thought that if they could be moral, they could be anti-Islamic. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 2455

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Reverse of the commonplace that Muslims borrow from the Bible; here a Christian scholar could not accept that religiously potent moral texts could come from Islam itself.
• QUESTION: Bedwell’s inference that moral capacity implies crypto-Christianity is a striking early-modern hermeneutic move worth tracing further.

Related

• Western scholars equated Islamic morality with the possibility of Islamic self-critique (similarity 0.84)
• Medieval storytellers assumed Muslims shared Christian moral standards. (similarity 0.82)
• Both Christians and Muslims internalized the moral-contrast trope about their two faiths (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christian polemicists presumed Muslims must accept the Christian Bible (similarity 0.81)
• Christian polemics against Islam argued from premises only Christians accepted (similarity 0.80)
• Some mediaeval Christians considered Muslims morally superior to Christians. (similarity 0.80)
• Anti-Quran polemics were crafted for Christian audiences rather than actual Muslims (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval Christian writers assumed Muslim doctrine derived from misinterpreted Scripture (similarity 0.80)
• Mediaeval anti-Islamic polemics convinced neither Muslims nor Christians (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval Christian polemics could only read Islam as affirming or negating Christianity (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval Christian writers recognized Islam shared their moral precepts (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval Christians recognized Islam as morally demanding, not merely permissive (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval Christian polemicists attributed to Muslims arguments the Muslims did not hold. (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval theorists assumed Muslim culpability rather than argued it (similarity 0.79)
• Christian polemicists charged the Qur’an with asserting and denying the same doctrines. (similarity 0.79)