Christian polemic on Muhammad’s character still shapes Western cultural inheritance

Evidence

Throughout the near fourteen centuries of Islam, Christians have defended their faith in the Trinity and Incarnation from Muslim attack; and they have in turn attacked Islam for accepting the claim of Muhammad to be the vehicle of Revelation, chiefly on the grounds that his character made it impossible reasonably to do so. Finally they have had to decide upon the admixture of truth and error: how to estimate its value, how to allow for the error, how to balance judgement upon the significance of each, and how to assess the final result. In respect of these points the mediaeval concept proved extremely durable; this outline of it is still a part of the cultural inheritance of the West to-day. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1534

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘character attack’ on Muhammad as disqualifying revelation is the ancestral form of modern moral condemnation of Islam and Muslims found in the vault’s Racial Muslim texts.