European contempt for Islam displayed remarkable continuity over centuries.

Evidence

Norman Daniel has argued: “Of the points that I summarised, most had a long life. The ‘fraudulent’ or ‘hypocritical’ character of Muhammad’s claim to prophesy, while he was an ambitious schemer, a bandit and a lecher; the emphasis on Islam as a falling short of Christianity, a sum of heresy, particularly in connection with the Trinity; preoccupation with the Qur’anic teaching of Christ; the general lines, if not all the details, of the most unflattering biography of Muhammad, and particularly the weight given to the influence of Sergius and other guides upon him; the enormous Importance given to two moral questions, the public reliance on force and the supposed private laxity in sexual matters; the ridicule and contempt of the Qur’anic Paradise; the suspicion of determinist and predestinarian ethics; the interest in Islamic religious practices, the admission of some Islamic practice as a good example, but the treatment of the cult in general in vain; all these, with some differences in emphasis, but with great continuity in the attitude of intellectual contempt, long dominated Christian and European thought.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1789