Explaining Islam’s rise demanded depicting pagan Arabs as ignorant and Jews as malicious

Evidence

Moreover, if this were Muhammad, it was necessary to show how he ever came to be accepted at all. The Arabia into which he was born is of crucial importance for any study of his life: this is obvious now, and seemed equally so to mediaeval writers. A convincing explanation of the rise of Islam required, not only that the Prophet should have been cunning, but that the pagan Arabs should have been ignorant, and the Arabian Jews and heretical Christians malicious. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 450

Categorization

• XREF: The necessity-of-cunning-enablers logic mirrors how Aziz/Razack show the ‘Muslim threat’ narrative needs a corresponding construction of a duped/gullible or complicit subject population.