Christian polemicists kept unreliable Christian testimony because it was more damning

Evidence

The real question is why they did not prefer Islamic authorities on Islamic subjects to Christian ones, whenever there was any conflict as to matters of fact; they all realised that it was desirable so far as possible to support allegations against Islam by Islamic testimony. Yet they were unable to bring themselves entirely to relinquish more damning testimony from Christian sources: testimony that would have been more damning had it been, in the modern sense, reliable; but which Muslims, like modern scholars, could never have considered other than a ridiculous travesty of fact. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1372

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s framing from ‘On Sacrifice’ about how ideology trades evidentiary integrity for rhetorical force.