Arabic texts were prized for polemic authenticity yet intellectually ignored by Latin Christians

Evidence

This contrasts with San Pedro, who referred to the pseudonymous Christian author of the Risalah, ‘Alquindus’, as authoritative and knowledgeable, precisely because he wrote in Arabic; in practice, however, he ignored him as completely as the author of the summula did. … The very great influence of the Risalah, in one form or another, is likely to have sprung, as San Pedro himself suggested, from its combination of authenticity with polemic utility. The authenticity of what derived from a Muslim country was generally recognised. … The Risalah material, however, had already been selected to illustrate its author’s arguments and insinuations about Muhammad; it had not been assembled academically. This explains both its appeal to mediaeval Europeans, and their general misunderstanding of the context to which the data referred to belong. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1287

Categorization

• XREF: The paradoxical grant-and-withdraw of authority to Arabic sources echoes how the vault shows Islam being simultaneously relied on and excluded as the West’s constitutive outside.