Christianity constituted Islam as a threat to its core unexamined beliefs

Evidence

The ideas which Islamic religion stated or implied seemed on the contrary liable to destroy many of the theological and moral concepts which Christendom most cherished. Mediaevals were almost excessively rationalistic about the mysteries of religion, with an astonishing faith in their provability, but certain groups of beliefs were never disturbed by a realisation of what Islam, or any other opponent, might question. These beliefs formed a circle which was never broken by any imaginative exteriorisation. Questions of which the importance was realised, for example, in the sphere of dogma that of the mode of revelation, and in the sphere of morals the value of abstinence and continence, were never conceived in the terms Muslims conceived them, and Christians continued to view their own beliefs from the inside. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1397

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the vault cluster on how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — resonates with Anidjar’s genealogy of the enemy and Aziz’s Racial Muslim in showing the logic of unexaminable core beliefs defining an external threat.