Christian writings on Islam must be read in their own contexts

Evidence

In my introduction I set two goals for this book: first, to examine these various Christian writings about Islam on their own terms, placing them in their particular (and multiple) contexts, rather than on a time line showing, say, the inexorable rise of orientalism or of ideologies justifying colonial expansion; second, to present a number of examples of the social and ideological uses of denigration and contempt, examples that should be of interest to nonmedievalists: historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and others. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1371

Categorization

• XREF: Tolan’s methodological stance is the corrective to overly linear genealogical readings in the vault — a check on the Anidjar/Aziz ‘genealogy of the Muslim trope’ approach.