European Qur’an scholarship could be textually accurate yet lack firsthand acquaintance with Muslims

Evidence

Maracci presents, one might almost say, the sum of Christian polemic against Islam known before his day. The tone has not changed, and the author admits evidence on non-Arabic authority, on, for example, San Pedro’s; but he has unequivocally recognised the need for textual accuracy. He supplies a great deal of authentic knowledge from Arabic sources, quite apart from the translation of the Qur’an itself; what he lacks, and noticeably so, is personal acquaintance with his subject; he has not that combination of experience and judgement that makes Pére Nau, for all his inferior scholarship, so formidable. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1699

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the vault’s core claim (Aziz/Razack) that ‘Islam’ as a Western object is built from textual/polemical sources rather than lived familiarity — the knowledge of the Other is manufactured without contact.
• QUESTION: What role did ‘personal acquaintance with the subject’ play for other figures in this polemic tradition — who was the last mediaeval/early-modern Christian scholar to actually know Muslims?
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how the absence of firsthand contact became a structural feature, not a defect, of Orientalist knowledge production — a genealogy of ‘armchair expertise about Islam’.