Islamophobic polemicists work from paid translation rather than primary sources.

Evidence

Why rely on Pipes’s book instead of the original? Because Ibn Warraq, like Pipes, cannot read Persian. Ali Dashti wrote it in the language of his fellow Iranians and published it in Iran long before these two monolinguals could pick up an English translation of it and weave it into a treacherous narrative to service the moral bankruptcy of an impotent empire. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 475

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reputation-vs.-expertise dynamic in the law-merchant and diamond-trade readings — delegation to intermediaries fills gaps in direct knowledge.

Related

• Anti-Islamic polemic often rests on secondhand citation of texts authors cannot read. (similarity 0.89)
• Insular academic language on Islam enables public charlatans (similarity 0.82)
• Polemicists kept absurd anti-Islam tales because they were proprietary (similarity 0.81)
• Islamophobic claims serve to positively define their speakers rather than describe Muslims (similarity 0.80)
• Even anti-Islamophobic Muslim novels indirectly accept the frame they oppose. (similarity 0.79)
• Individual Muslim writers are not trapped by the interpretive frame that dominates their reception (similarity 0.79)
• Islamic Orientalists turned alienation into superiority rather than self-understanding (similarity 0.79)
• Ibn Warraq condemns apostasy in Islam while unable to read its primary sources. (similarity 0.78)
• Medieval anti-Islamic polemic could work from accurate hadith rather than fabricated detail (similarity 0.78)