Early Islam scholarship was a weapon in intra-Christian polemics.
Evidence
It was also the case that for centuries to come those who wrote about Islam tended to do so not because they were interested in Islam per se, but because they wished to use discussion of its rituals and practices as a stick with which to beat the Papacy, or alternatively, as a stick with which to beat those who urged reform of the Catholic Church. The English scholastic, John Wyclif (c. 1324–84), campaigned for reform of the Papacy and for the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. As Wyclif made plain in various of his writings, though the Muslims were misguided, they were no more so than most Catholics. Islam, as he understood it, was just like the Catholic Church he knew – violent, corrupt and greedy. The rise of Islam had been caused by the pride and greed of the Church. Power and wealth were the inappropriate characteristics of both the Papacy and Islam. Indeed, in Wyclif’s eyes, the Catholic Church was, in a sense, a Muslim institution. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 97
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to my grafted/complaints pieces: here the ‘other’ is invoked to attack one’s own institution — the same refracted-self structure as moral panics over dress.
Related
- Early European Islam scholarship served Christian infighting, not accurate study (similarity 0.87)
- Interfaith study should serve understanding rather than conversion or polemic (similarity 0.79)
- Wycliffe saw Islam as a mirror of Western Church corruption (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval interreligious polemics operated without shared evidentiary premises (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval Christian polemic framed Islam alongside heresy and Judaism (similarity 0.78)