Christians wrote about Islam mainly to persuade themselves, not to understand Muslims.

Evidence

Marti cited the argument that one should consult the farmer about agriculture and the doctor about medicine; it is ironic that the failure to find out what Muslims themselves asserted to be their beliefs should have been characteristic of Christian polemic. A brilliant Christian writer perceived what was far from obvious to his contemporaries: ‘if Christians deny the histories of the Muslims and the Jews’, said Bacon, who never, so far as we know, had the opportunity personally to speak to a Muslim, ‘they, by the same right, will deny the histories of the Christians’. … The invariable tendency to neglect what the Qur’an meant, or what Muslims thought it meant, or what Muslims thought or did in any given circumstances, necessarily implies that Qur’anic and other Islamic doctrine was presented only in a form that would convince Christians; and more and more extravagant forms would stand a chance of acceptance as the distance of writers and public from the Islamic border increased. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1439

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that polemic addresses the home audience, not the opponent, and that accuracy only ever shores up a fixed structure, is a generalizable insight about how belief systems resist correction.
• XREF: connects to: Christian polemists preferred their own readings over traditional Islamic interpretation; Christian anti-Islamic polemic targeted Christian readers, not Muslims — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1469