Europe’s image of Islam tracked its political and military needs, not theology

Evidence

Islam took its place rather dramatically, but inevitably, in the historical sequence as a prefiguration of Antichrist, for as long as political, economic and military requirements dominated European thought upon the subject. The more theoretical analysis of heresy and the more practical association of Islam with schism, with other /aws, and with nations without Jaws, and the interrelation of all these concepts obviously reflect the conditions of political geography. Islam effectively dominated a large part of the world which it disputed with all kinds of religions. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1070

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s recurring pattern that reputational and moral classifications track practical/institutional needs — akin to noise-regulation and trust-regime history. — connects to: Even sympathetic European scholarship ignored Islam’s living devotional spirituality
• SEED: Angle: how an enemy’s moral classification follows infrastructure and geography — the ‘anti-Antichrist’ moved with the trade routes and war fortunes.