Christians can study Islam as attractive without surrendering their own beliefs

Evidence

Both Christianity and Islam suffer under the weight of worldly pressure, and the attack of scientific-atheists and their like. Both may reconsider the old controversies, not in any pointless expectation of ceasing to disagree, but in the hope of learning something new. There is also an opportunity of making sure that disagreement has not been exaggerated needlessly or wilfully. Christians may suddenly find that Islam is inherently attractive without there being need to surrender (still less, pretend to surrender) any of their own beliefs. What in the past was frozen has begun at last to thaw; what the mediaevals studied we may study again, making use of what they did; but we may do it for its own sake, and without thought of propaganda, and without hatred. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1745

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: interfaith study as refreshment and shared inquiry, not conversion or polemic — what ‘studying the other for its own sake’ could mean.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the reader’s broader interest in religious moral panics and interfaith dynamics.
• XREF: connects to: Islamic scholarship by Christian academics reframed Islam as a shared spiritual enterprise — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1740