Enlightenment praise of Islam extended the mediaeval attack on infidels to Christianity itself

Evidence

This is the background to the more famous writers of the eighteenth century, who liked to attack or to praise Islam only as a means to attack Christianity. Again the weapons of the mediaevals were used. Boulainvilliers and Savary, praising Islam as a natural religion, really extend the satiric attack on Christians from the field of morals where orthodox Latins kept it to the field of doctrine itself. Often mediaeval arguments against Islam which were capable of being applied against any religion were now used against Christianity. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1605

Categorization

• XREF: Directly complicates the vault’s construction-of-outside thesis: here critique of the outside Muslim is repurposed to tear at the inside Christian — Islam serves as both the West’s enemy and its ironic mirror. — connects to: Voltaire’s anti-Islam attacks served his campaigns against religion itself
• QUESTION: Voltaire’s Mahomet as a mask for antiroyalism — does the modern Western discourse about ‘Islamism’ likewise function as a displaced critique of one’s own state?