Accuracy about Islam declined with geographic distance from the Islamic border
Evidence
The invariable tendency to neglect what the Qur’an meant, or what Muslims thought it meant, or what Muslims thought or did in any given circumstances, necessarily implies that Qur’anic and other Islamic doctrine was presented in a form that would convince Christians; and more and more extravagant forms would stand a chance of acceptance as the distance of the writers and public from the Islamic border increased. … There were shades of difference, but only with a common framework. All the corrections that were made in the interests of an increasing accuracy were only a defence of what had newly been realised to be vulnerable, a shoring up of a weakened structure. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 166
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- QUESTION: Worth chasing the historical claim that extravagance of portrayal scaled with distance from the Islamic border.
Related
- Distance from the Islamic border allowed increasingly extravagant anti-Islamic claims to be accepted (similarity 0.85)
- Representations of Islam ignored Muslim self-understanding and resisted factual correction (similarity 0.82)
- Social distance from Christian society enabled more accurate observation of Islam (similarity 0.79)
- Accurate knowledge of Islam circulated wherever Latin States stood, not in ignorance (similarity 0.79)
- Even accurate information about Islam reaching Europe had no reliability filter. (similarity 0.79)
- Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.78)