Christians attacked Islam by historicizing Muhammad’s revelation to its place and time.

Evidence

Christian polemic would be, on the contrary, to show that he was the author of his religion, and to discredit his revelation by showing it to have arisen out of the social and political circumstances of a particular place and age. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 384

Categorization

• SEED: A recurring move worth tracing: present-day critics still discredit Islam by reducing it to seventh-century Arabian sociopolitical circumstances, showing deep continuity in how the tradition is delegitimized.
• XREF: Parallel to Edward Said’s Orientalism argument and to the vault’s claim that ‘Islam’ is constructed rather than given — here historicization is itself a delegitimizing technique.