Hostile Christian descriptions of Islam repeated themselves virtually unchanged across centuries

Evidence

It is astonishing how even the details of their criticisms were repetitions passed down over centuries. The present writer many years ago prepared a statement of Islamic belief from the accounts of seventeenth-century travellers, and, although he did so in conditions which separated that work from the work on the Middle Ages with which this present book is concerned, the descriptions of the Christian attitudes of the two periods correspond so minutely as to astound the reader of both. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1574

Categorization

• XREF: Doctrine of the continuity of anti-Islamic polemic connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis about enduring discursive patterns. — connects to: False statements about Islam persisted for centuries because community good seemed to require them
• SEED: An essay on how medieval-to-early-modern European misrepresentations of Islam were transmitted and recycled, and how similar stable tropes persist in modern commentary, would fit here.