Europe’s image of Muslim fatalism emerged only after the Renaissance.

Evidence

The fatalism of Islam in everyday mundane matters and misfortunes which later in Europe came to seem most typical of the East does not seem particularly to have impressed Western Christians of the Middle Ages. Perhaps they were themselves more habitually resigned to the will of God than men of the centuries that have followed the Renaissance have been. In so far as they could even less than we control their fate, they were certainly wise to submit to it. In travellers of the seventeenth century, for example, this fatalism was a mark of the difference between the two societies; Muslims would not, by taking precautions, struggle against the plague.’* At the earlier period this sharp sense of difference was noticeably absent. That powerful moralist Jacques de Vitry noted exactly the sense of fatalism which would later be so greatly stressed; but he was the only mediaeval writer of the formative period to do so. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 870

Categorization

• XREF: Strongly relevant to the reading thread: a dated, historically located marker of ‘the East’ being invented — fatalism only became ‘typical of the East’ in later centuries, exactly the kind of constructed-constitutive-outside evidence the vault’s Anidjar/Aziz/Razack cluster argues for.