Heresiarchs required miracles, so polemicists cast Muhammad as trickster
Evidence
In order to win converts to his cause, a heresiarch needs to perform miracles. Here the four texts depart completely from (deformed) Muslim tradition to portray Muhammad as a trickster and magician who dupes his followers by performing false miracles. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 753
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Explains the structural logic by which the ‘heresiarch’ type obligates false miracles — a genre constraint driving the trope of Muhammad as magician.
Related
- Medieval polemic framed Muhammad as a miracle-faking trickster to fit the heresiarch archetype (similarity 0.93)
- Twelfth-century biographies made Muhammad a magical fraudster beyond prior polemic (similarity 0.79)
- Christian polemicists privileged Muhammad’s self-denial of miracles as their key evidence (similarity 0.79)
- Later medieval polemicists reproduced hostile biographies of Muhammad as heresy (similarity 0.78)
- Aquinas attacked Muhammad for lacking miracles, a core trope of anti-Islamic polemic (similarity 0.78)