Anti-Islamic polemic served to deter conversion and justify war against Muslims.

Evidence

Among those who did not, a number assigned to Islam a place in the pantheon of God’s enemies in order to discourage fellow Christians from converting to Islam or to justify military action against Muslims. It is the anti-Muslim works of these Christian authors from the seventh to the thirteenth century that constitute the subject of this book. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 49

Categorization

• XREF: Directly suits the reader’s root-source goal: names the immediate political functions (anti-conversion, war justification) that generated the tropes later globalized.