Christian polemicists distorted the Qur’an by insisting it lacked charges they knew were there.

Evidence

Peter the Venerable, unusually, was ill-informed; he strangely insisted that the Qur’an does not mention the falsification of Scripture (or, he implies, the falsification of their revelation) by Christians and Jews; his imprecision may be the source of Fitzralph’s. The plain fact is that the text of Ketton’s Qur’an which Peter claimed to have searched in vain, made clear sense of verses which assert or imply tahrif, the corruption of Scripture. ‘And dost thou therefore expect the conversion of (the Jews) to thy religion? Definitely not. For they changed the word of God, which they had heard and known, and they did not want anything from it to be effected.’ Peter curiously pretended that one could search the Qur’an in vain ‘from the first word to the last’ for any such statement. Most improbably, he missed even the ‘Ahmad’ prophecy, which Ketton rendered quite clearly: ‘Christ, the son of Mary, saying, O children of Israel… I announce an Apostle to you; they claimed with a lie that the Apostle who 1s to come after Me, whose name is Muhammad, is a sorcerer.’ This is a muddled translation, but it is not muddled about the contention that Christ foretold Muhammad. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 312

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to the vault cluster on how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — here through deliberate misreading/scant scholarship by medieval Christian polemicists, echoing the epistemologies of ignorance in Razack’s Casting Out.
• DEEPTHINKING: The pattern of a Christian authority deliberately misrepresenting a text he demonstrably had in front of him is a striking case of willed ignorance in the service of polemic — worth sitting with as a genealogical precursor.