Christian Arab polemics selected only Muhammad’s defeats that served their argument

Evidence

The author of the Risalah, an Arab, took the facts of Muhammad’s life for granted. He referred to some of them to prove his argument, and ignored such as were no use to this end. The defeat at Uhud was discussed, the victory at Badr ignored; the latter was irrelevant to any attack on Muhammad, and Muslims, and the Qur’an itself, considered it in fact the special sign of God’s mercy. The Christian Arab polemist had no occasion to refer to it, and it happened that refutation of the Islamic attitude to it did not enter into his scheme. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 531

Categorization

• XREF: The selective deployment of facts to fit a polemical narrative parallels the cherry-picking patterns seen in Milgrom’s institutional analysis and in how reputation systems distort information.