Bede understood the Saracens through biblical references rather than observation

Evidence

Yet Bede does not always portray Saracens as quasi-Christians. He gives a different view in his commentary to Acts 7:43, where God upbraids the Israelites for lapsing into idolatry. Among other foreign gods, they worship “the star of Remphan.” This star, Bede explains, is “Lucifer, into whose cult the race of the Saracens is enslaved in honor of Venus.” In the eighth century “Lucifer” refers to the morning star (i.e., the planet Venus) rather than to the devil; yet this association with the devil will suggest itself to Bede’s later medieval readers. The way to understand the Saracens is to comb the Bible for references to them. Having done so, Bede can assign to them an appropriate niche in Christian history. Here Bede seems not to suspect that the religion of Saracens may have changed and the cult of Remphan fallen into disrepute; the Bible, after all, was his surest guide to truth in the world around him. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 437

The advantage that the Saracens held over other distant invaders (say, the Magyars), from the point of view of a monk and scholar like Bede, was that one could find out about them by looking in the Bible. After all, the Bible, says Bede, is superior to all other writings in antiquity, utility, and authority. It is in his biblical commentaries that Bede shows that he indeed is aware of the breadth and importance of the Saracen invasions. Genesis 16:12 described Ishmael as “a wild man” whose “hand will be against every man.” Like many of his contemporary Eastern brethren, Bede saw this as a clear reference to the Saracen conquests: “Now how great is his hand against all and all hands against him; as they impose his authority upon the whole length of Africa and hold both the greater part of Asia and some of Europe, hating and opposing all.” Bede’s view of the Saracens changed over time. In his early years he could portray Mu‘âwiya as a distant and sympathetic king who protected his Christian subjects and built churches for his people. As the Saracen invasions moved ever further west—and then north into Europe—Bede portrayed them as no better than the other “pagan” persecutors that plundered Europe: rod of divine chastisement that would in the end either be crushed or converted. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 447

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how Christians mapped contemporary peoples onto biblical types — parallels the reader’s interest in how knowledge systems (like scripture) get used as evidence about the present world.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when did ‘Lucifer’ shift from morning star to devil in Christian exegesis, and did the Venus-idolatry reading of Islam persist beyond Bede?
• SEED: Angle for an essay: ‘The hermeneutic cage’ — how a powerful interpretive text (Bible, Quran, algorithm) made it cheaper and more authoritative to read new peoples through prophecy than to investigate them, and what that cost.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 437; John V. Tolan, Saracens, 447