Early European Islam scholarship served Christian infighting, not accurate study

Evidence

Very few people, if any, studied Islam for its own sake. Instead, polemical Christians elaborated the outlines of a life of Muhammad and of the rise of Islam that were often intended to be used in intraconfessional polemic. For example, Catholic scholars made use of an exposition of the ‘horrible heresies and perversions’ of Islam in order to attack what they claimed were essentially similar Protestant deviations from the true faith. Was not Protestant denial of the efficacy of intercession by saints and the Protestant adherence to predestination essentially the same as the Muslim position on those matters? The Protestants, for their part, attacked the Pope as a latterday Muhammad and found all sorts of sinister similarities between Islam and Roman Catholicism. The real nature of Islam was not an issue. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 152

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the moral-panic-as-identity-politics dynamic in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — othering a third group to settle intra-community scores. — connects to: Even sympathetic European scholarship ignored Islam’s living devotional spirituality
• SEED: Essay angle: how enemies are weaponized as proxies in the conflicts they stand outside of — Catholics and Protestants both used ‘Muslim heresy’ as ammunition against each other.

Related

• Early Islam scholarship was a weapon in intra-Christian polemics. (similarity 0.87)
• Even sympathetic European scholarship ignored Islam’s living devotional spirituality (similarity 0.85)
• Medieval Christian polemic framed Islam alongside heresy and Judaism (similarity 0.83)
• Europe’s image of Islam tracked its political and military needs, not theology (similarity 0.82)
• Latin Christians attacked Islam mainly because Muslim intellectual influence threatened them (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval European misinformation about Islam came from polemical needs, not ignorance. (similarity 0.81)
• Islamophobia scholarship often treats medieval Christianity as a united whole against Muslims (similarity 0.81)
• Europe’s intellectual engagement with Islam arose because Islam outcompeted it culturally (similarity 0.81)
• Latin Christian polemicists classified Islam as a heresy rather than a separate religion (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christians weaponized accurate Islamic learning for polemics (similarity 0.81)
• Historical scholarship overstates Christianity’s unity against adversaries. (similarity 0.81)
• Islam served as Europe’s constitutive outsider against which its civilization defined itself (similarity 0.81)
• European anti-Islamic polemic derived Islam from Christian and Jewish heresy (similarity 0.80)
• Interfaith study should serve understanding rather than conversion or polemic (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval Christian polemics could only read Islam as affirming or negating Christianity (similarity 0.80)