Even notorious anti-Muslim polemicists eventually saw their own excesses as counterproductive.

Evidence

The 1799 Life expresses horror at the thought that Muslims ‘go about their religious farrago as if they worshipped God in the best possible manner, resulting from a well-informed judgement and an explicit, indubitable revelation of his mind and will’ — this author apparently cannot bear that Muslims should believe this to be exactly the case; he seems scarcely sane on the subject. He naturally gives the Sergius legend full credit; but among serious writers it disappeared after Prideaux with remarkable, if overdue, rapidity; Sale thought its debunking worth only a footnote. … Prideaux, himself one of the worst disseminators of the absurd, pointed out that ‘the Christians, who abhorred [Muhammad’s] wickedness, are apt to say too much… . To snatch at every story which would disparage the Religion they were against …’ — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 2447

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader history of how anti-Islam polemic in the West developed and self-corrected, echoing the author’s wider survey of prejudice-based historiography.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how quickly did the Sergius legend actually die out among serious writers after Prideaux, and what drove that shift?