Contact with Muslims forced medieval Christians to drop absurd anti-Islamic stories

Evidence

We cannot just excuse them as ignorant. Admittedly there was less misrepresentation and less indulgence in fancy, generally speaking, by authors whose lives brought them close to Muslim sources. These were forced, by their contact with Muslims, or by a study of Arabic material, or simply by a climate of opinion formed by intercourse between Christians and Muslims, to discard some absurd stories that remained popular among more remote or less serious authors. In such circumstances there was no alternative but to admit a greater degree of what we should now recognise as truth, and to base polemic on data which Muslims might accept, and would at any rate recognise. Even so, whenever a choice between stories, or between interpretations of stories, occurred, well-informed and ignorant authors alike often accepted those which were quite untrue in the judgement of modern scholarship, and which, indeed, must have seemed to them highly improbable, had they been alleged of Christians in the world familiar to themselves. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1285

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the sociology of knowledge: how proximity to the object of prejudice forces revision—mirrors modern findings on intergroup contact reducing stereotype acceptance. — connects to: Physical contact with Muslims forced medieval authors toward greater accuracy
• QUESTION: The phrase ‘must have seemed to them highly improbable, had they been alleged of Christians in the world familiar to themselves’ suggests a testable asymmetry—did medieval Christians apply stricter plausibility standards to claims about their own group?