Early Christian polemics canonized caricatures of Muhammad that persisted for centuries

Evidence

St John also introduced other elements that would long survive: he descended to ridicule, for example, of what he mistakenly took to be Qur’anic belief, the camel of God, in a petty way; and he began the long tradition o attacking Muhammad for bringing in God - simulating revelation - in order to justify his own sexual indulgence, instancing the story of Zayd and Zaynab, which would become a classic Christian theme.‘ He also asserted that Muhammad made up his doctrine from the Old and New Testaments on the advice of an Arian monk who instructed him. All these ideas were to be important in later Christian polemic. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s Anidjar thread on how the religious Other gets constructed as a degraded mirror of the self — here the Prophet as sexual libertine and plagiarist.
• SEED: A genealogy essay tracing the ‘Muhammad as fraud motivated by lust’ trope from St John Damascene through medieval polemic to modern Islamophobic caricature would fit this thread.