Christendom’s coherent image of Islam explains its ideological longevity

Evidence

In all the circumstances, there is nothing remarkable about the mediaeval willingness always to believe the worst about Islam, or in the open and admitted hostility of the Muslim and Christian communities. Naturally, mediaevals never admitted that what was said about Islam was exaggerated or silly, still less that it was frequently untrue. What was admitted and stressed was that the religion of Islam was unlike, alien to and incompatible, in many ways, with a Christian tradition of which the truth, even in inessentials, was not questioned. Even what was held in common sometimes only drew attention to this contrast. The difference was stressed partly with the conscious purpose of refuting the Islamic claim to fulfil the prophecies; but it was also an admission that the two cultures had distinct identities. The integrity of each required that the other should be rejected, and rejected whole. In religion, there was no compromise, or exchange of views or intermixture of ideas. It may well be that the internal consistency and integrity of the Christian concept of Islam was one reason for its long survival in the European consciousness. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1505

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that a consistent adversarial image survives because of its internal integrity echoes how the vault treats ‘the Racial Muslim’ as a durable, self-reproducing construct.