Christian authors strained old categories to fit Islam rather than rethink them.

Evidence

Medieval Christian writers could not acknowledge this, because it would have cost them too much to abandon their Christian view of history and geography. Just as Columbus insisted that he had sailed to Asia and found the garden of Eden rather than abandon his notions of geography, so medieval writers would stretch their old language to accommodate Islam, to squeeze it into preexisting categories rather than rethinking those categories. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 162

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general psychology of paradigm persistence — Kuhn’s reluctance to abandon frameworks echoes this. Also parallels Columbus’s geography stubbornness.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense point about how authoritative books become cognitive prisons: the very reverence for auctores that generated knowledge became the trap that prevented seeing a genuinely new phenomenon.