False claims about Islam circulated because communal good seemed to require them

Evidence

Ultimately, Gresham’s law would work in reverse in the circulation of statements about Islam, but it was a long time before the good drove out the bad, and until the end of the seventeenth century a general tendency to prefer false statements persisted. Credulity was all but universal, for as long as the good of the community seemed - however mistakenly - to require it. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1394

Categorization

• XREF: The community-good mechanism for preferring falsity parallels how the vault shows ‘Islam’ as constitutive outside being maintained by perceived communal necessity.
• QUESTION: When exactly did the good drive out the bad — what historical shift ended the preference for false statements about Islam after the seventeenth century? Worth investigating whether scholarship self-corrected or merely changed forms.