Christian polemicists read Muslim texts without Muslim consultation

Evidence

Even the Qur’anic title of the Prophet’s wives, ‘the Mothers of the Believers’, was given a nasty interpretation.®? The favourite Christian technique was to decide what a text must mean without consultation of those most concerned, if these were Muslim authorities; often, what a text must mean was what was nastiest. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 568

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s reading thread on how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — here the mechanism is Christian polemicists reading scripture adversarially, akin to Anidjar’s genealogy of how European categories determined Jewish and Muslim meaning.
• QUESTION: The author frames this as a distinctively Christian hermeneutic technique. Is there a parallel Christian self-reading practice, or is ‘deciding what a text must mean without consultation’ particular to how it treated Islam?