Belief in hostile conspiracy enables rewriting a founder’s historiography

Evidence

This presentation of a wholly new version of the historical figure of Muhammad, one which no Arab could recognise, was facilitated by the ease with which it is possible to believe in some vast conspiracy to deceive; people have believed to an exaggerated extent in the conspiracies against society of Albigensians or Freemasons or Jesuits founded on esoteric knowledge. It is still easier to believe that a body of facts is suppressed by an openly hostile society. Thus a ‘real truth’ was substituted for an ‘ostensible’ one: for the Prophet of the Hijaz, the magician whom swine devoured. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1377

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘real truth versus ostensible truth’ substitution mechanism parallels how modern Islamophobic discourse claims to expose a suppressed reality about Islam; connects to Anidjar’s genealogy of Jew/Christian/Muslim exclusivity. — connects to: Conspiracy theorists used hypnosis to legitimize revisions as recovered memory — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 462; Nearly a hundred independent 1776 declarations built conspiracist narratives toward revolution — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 57
• SHARE: Would interest anyone in the conspiracy-theory literature — the point that believing a hostile society suppresses facts primes one to accept wholesale rewritten history.