George Sale’s preface judged Muhammad sincere and unbiased, breaking with polemic tradition

Evidence

On the main point of Muhammad’s good intentions or hypocrisy, his views look forward to those that were to become established after his time: he disowns any intention to decide whether Muhammad proclaimed the unity of God as ‘the effect of enthusiasm, or only a design to raise himself to the supreme government of the country’; he witnessed powerfully against Prideaux’s view that Muhammad made the Arabs ‘exchange their idolatry for another religion altogether as bad’. He did not doubt that Muhammad was ‘fully satisfied in his conscience on the truth of his grand point, the unity of God … all his other doctrines and institutions being rather accidental and unavoidable, than premeditated and designed’.” — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1707

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how scholarship of other traditions (e.g., Hindu texts, the Talmud) similarly moved from polemic to dispassionate study; parallels the trajectory described in other religious-studies histories.