Best-informed authors combined fabulous Christian legends with reliable Islamic sources without resolving conflict

Evidence

His Christian sources were among the most fabulous and fantastic, including versions of the disappointed Roman cleric, Maurus, who inspired Muhammad, and of the bull and dove pseudomiracles. … Yet in saying that these things were discovered by Christian writers, he admitted implicitly that they were formally denied by Islam. His Islamic sources were of the very best; he often apparently follows ibn Ishaq. … He was not prepared definitely to discard the ‘Christian’ stories, however absurd, and was fairly convinced that aspects were true. Modern scholarship assumes that the Christian legend grew out of the Muslim one; San Pedro reckoned that the Muslim one went some way towards admitting, and unintentionally revealing, the Christian. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1308

Categorization

• QUESTION: San Pedro’s inverted causal logic — that the Muslim account unintentionally ‘reveals’ the Christian legend — is a distinctive early mode of reading the enemy’s own sources against themselves, worth following.