Christian polemicists fabricated the content of pre-Islamic paganism

Evidence

Lull knew the old name, ‘Yathrib’, for Medina, but he had no clear topographical notions. He told his son that ‘Yathrib and Mecca and all that province were full of people who believed in idols and who adored the sun and the moon and the beasts and the birds, and had no knowledge of God, and had no king, and were people of little discretion or understanding’. The nature worship is his own invention, implying presuppositions about the dogmatic content of paganism; but he rightly said that the people had no belief in immortality, and he described Muhammad’s preaching of Judgement and heavenly reward. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 465

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s critical-race constructionist thread: the fabricated ‘nature worship’ shows how the constitutive outside of Islam (‘crude paganism’) was itself rhetorically manufactured, analogous to how Anidjar/Aziz document ‘Islam’ being built up as a constructed foil.