Europe’s intellectual engagement with Islam arose because Islam outcompeted it culturally

Evidence

If twelfth century Latin Europe “discovered” Islam, it viewed it through its own (rather thick) lenses. Certainly, twelfth-century European Christians took Islam more seriously than they did the religious beliefs of the non-Christians such as the Wends or Lithuanians. Islam was worth studying and attacking for two reasons. First, it seemed to be another heresy of Eastern origin, like those plaguing twelfth-century Europe; as such it was less important than the Manichean error of Catharism, which indeed received more attention than Islam. The second reason for the growth of a polemical interest in Islam is the profound cultural and intellectual influence the Muslim world was exercising on Latin Europe in the twelfth century: notably through trade and through the translations of scientific and philosophical works from Arabic to Latin. Confronted with a thriving, prosperous, intellectually sophisticated Muslim world, the Christian polemicist needed to convince his readers that the “heresy of Muhammad” was a debased parody of the true religion. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 885

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the vault’s Islam-West opposition framing: the medieval root of the constructed inferior-other is a defensive inversion of a civilization actually seen as thriving and sophisticated. — connects to: European science built directly on Muslim scholarship and Copernicus drew on Arabic sources — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 340
• SEED: The paradox that modern anti-Islam discourse (as mapped via Aziz/Razack) descends from a stance where the West was the anxious party threatened by Islamic superiority could anchor an article on the genealogy of the ‘heretical parody’ frame.