Anti-Islamic polemic circulated as a living shared tradition, not through single fixed texts

Evidence

Its case may be similar to that of the Risalah and other examples of Oriental Christian polemic. The Risalah’s arguments appear and reappear in different forms in different Christian works, so that it seems safe only to speak of a living tradition of Oriental Christian polemic in which many authors (including Latin authors) drew, to which they in turn contributed, and of which the Risdlah is itself perhaps only one important example. In the same way the Contrarietas may have drawn upon a living and oral tradition among the Mozarabs, whose contribution to anti-Islamic polemic, as I have already remarked, is unexpectedly small. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 91

The Risalah’s arguments appear and reappear in different forms in different Christian works, so that it seems safe only to speak of a living tradition of Oriental Christian polemic in which many authors (including Latin authors) drew, to which they in turn contributed, and of which the Risdlah is itself perhaps only one important example. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 91

Categorization

• SEED: The idea that religious polemic circulated orally as a living tradition among a minority community, rather than through authoritative texts, is an angle for an essay on how anti-religious rhetoric actually propagates.
• XREF: Complicates the vault’s picture of a single canonical anti-Islam source by showing a fluid, multi-author polemical tradition — parallel to how Anidjar stresses genealogical fluidity over fixed origins. — connects to: Medieval anti-Islamic polemic circulated as a living shared tradition; Vituperative anti-Islamic polemic persisted into the 1780s and 1790s.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this ‘living tradition’ model of polemic map onto how anti-Islamic claims circulate today (memes, op-eds) more than discrete authoritative texts?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 91