Christians seized on Muhammad’s own denial of miracles as confession of fraud.

Evidence

With gratification Latins maintained that in the Qur’4n Muhammad had denied his own power to work miracles; we have seen already that they could not take seriously the Qur’an’s assertion that it is itself the true miracle. Pedro said that the Qur’an gave as its reason that men would ‘speak against’ the Prophet for his miracles, ‘as against the other prophets’, if he were given the power to work them. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 422

Categorization

• XREF: This interpretive double-bind — treating a text’s self-deprecating refrain as self-incrimination — resembles how polemicists read any scriptural humility as confession.