Christian polemicists conceded Islam’s stronger defense of God’s prerogatives

Evidence

San Pedro was willing to admit the difficulties of the Christian position about predestination. He had said that the goodness of God could not be reconciled with the Muslim belief; he agreed that it was equally hard to reconcile it with the creation of souls whose damnation God foresees. His answers only partly satisfied him; in the last resort he had to fall back upon pious agnosticism: God has given men as much understanding of things as it pleased Him to give, and all knowledge He has not given; Christ said we were not to know the times or moments; it is the universal experience that spiritual creatures can know only as much of the future as God has made manifest. This is a sensible attitude, but to be consistent he must imply that Muslims cannot adopt the same attitude, and this San Pedro did not attempt to show. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 883

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault cluster on how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — here a medieval Christian admitting Islam defends God’s prerogatives better, undermining the dichotomy even as the polemic asserts it.