Interest in Islam itself emerged only when polemical political motives faded

Evidence

We should grossly simplify if we called this an emancipation from mediaeval modes of thought. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, there was a serious attempt to establish sound knowledge that might, ostensibly at least, be undeniable by Muslims in the event of controversy. … The point was rather that in the Middle Ages there were political, perhaps sociological, reasons why Islam should be suspect, and untrue things should seem more probable than true ones, and be believed. It is quite often apparent that in the Middle Ages there was no interest in Islam itself, but only in inducing some particular state of mind about it in Christians … As these reasons ceased to exist, a scientific attitude — that is, an attitude of pure science, interested in the thing in itself - was free to develop. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1710

Categorization

• XREF: Directly substantiates the vault thread: the modern ‘scientific’ study of Islam is the residue left once Islam stops serving as the West’s polemical foil — the converse of Anidjar’s claim that the Jew/Arab genealogy sustains Europe’s self-constitution.
• DEEPTHINKING: Sits with the vault’s constitutive-outside thesis: it offers a materialist (political/sociological) explanation for when a culture is studied for itself vs. as a foil — a mechanism usually asserted rather than argued in the anti-Orientalist corpus.