Christian polemicists imagined educated Muslims as secretly doubting their own faith

Evidence

Llull rejects the Dominican strategy, forging his own approach, an idiosyncratic fusion of Dominican rationalism and thoroughness with Franciscan mysticism and pathos. For Llull, the superiority of Christianity to Islam can be demonstrated rationally, if through the rather abstruse and idiosyncratic tool of Llull’s Art. For Llull (as for many earlier authors) Muhammad lacks the signs of prophecy, and the Koran is full of contradictions. He asserts that learned Muslims themselves are aware of this and do not believe that Muhammad was a prophet. They are (like Peter the Venerable’s imagined Muslim audience a century and a half earlier) an audience ripe for conversion, if only Christians can properly attend to the task. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1279

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: to what extent did this imagined ‘ripe for conversion’ Muslim audience reflect real contact with Muslim intellectuals, or pure projection?
• XREF: connects to: Lull saw Muslim and Christian fears of misbelief as mirror images