Christians portrayed Muhammad’s miracles as parodic echoes of Jewish scripture

Evidence

The correspondence between Islam and Judaism is reinforced by the false miracles performed by Muhammad in his effort to win the “foolish people” to his side: he prepares channels in the ground filled with milk and honey and covers them with brush, so that he can miraculously “discover” them; he trains a white bull from the time that it is a calf to come at his call and kneel before him, presenting the Qur’an (which Muhammad has prepared previously) between its horns (1397–1584). The first episode is intended to evoke the land of milk and honey, the long-sought goal of the Israelites; the second refers to the episode at Sinai, with this new Moses, as it were, conflating the “law” itself with the act of idolatry. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 235

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the article on moral panics and cross-cultural religious representation: medieval Christian polemicists borrowed Jewish typologies to construct a negative Islam, a parallel to how dress panics borrowed existing moral frameworks.
• SHARE: The detail of a trained white bull presenting the Qur’an between its horns as a ‘false miracle’ is a wonderfully specific medieval polemic fact to send to anyone into medieval anti-Islamic literature.