Immediate political motives, not ideology alone, drove medieval representations of Islam

Evidence

The goal, rather than to dole out posthumous prizes for “tolerance” or castigations for intolerance, is to understand what motivated individual writers to portray Saracens as pagan idolaters or to paint Muhammad as a debauched heresiarch—or, on the contrary, to argue that Islam was as legitimate (or nearly so) as Christianity. … Only by carefully examining the specific contexts in which medieval authors worked can we understand what motivated them to portray Islam as they did. Among the various motivations exposed are the desire to justify a war against or an alliance with a Muslim state, an attempt to dissuade Christians from converting to Islam, and a need to justify the rule of Christian princes over Muslim subjects. Only by paying close attention to the contexts and motivations of individual writers can we understand what they say about Islam, not by attempting to string them together to produce a narrative of growing intolerance. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1374

Categorization

• XREF: The motivating functions listed — justifying war/alliance, dissuading converts, justifying Christian rule over Muslims — give concrete causal mechanisms for the trope-genealogy the reader already holds from Aziz/Razack.