For four centuries Europe knew virtually nothing of Islam as religion.

Evidence

Norman Daniel characterizes the first four hundred years of contact (between 700 and 1100 CE) as the “age of ignorance.” During this period the West “knew virtually nothing of Islam as a religion. For them Islam was only one of a large number of enemies threatening Christendom from every direction, and they had no interest in distinguishing the primitive idolators of Northmen, Slav, and Magyars from the monotheism of Islam… . There is no sign that anyone in northern Europe had even heard the name Mahomet.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 49

Categorization

• XREF: Falsifies the clash-of-civilizations framing the reader is hunting for; Islam-as-other was a later elite construction.