Byzantine anti-Islamic polemic was written as philosophical sport rather than persuasion

Evidence

In the Byzantine polemic of Nicetas of Byzantium, in the ninth century, we meet a different tradition, less febrile but inclined to a niggling pettiness, and a dialectical subtlety that one would suppose could convince nobody, and least of all a Muslim; this sort of polemic was written as a philosophical exercise and sport. The greatest part of his Anatrope is devoted to picking piecemeal at the Qur’an; it does not even try to understand the Qur’adn before refuting it. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 58

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: meticulous scholarship deployed not to understand but to destroy — polemic as intellectual exercise, comparing Byzantine ‘sport’ refutation with modern bad-faith criticism.