Latin Christians attacked Islam mainly because Muslim intellectual influence threatened them

Evidence

If twelfth century Latin Europe “discovered” Islam, it viewed it through its own (rather thick) lenses. Certainly, twelfth-century European Christians took Islam more seriously than they did the religious beliefs of the non-Christians such as the Wends or Lithuanians. Islam was worth studying and attacking for two reasons. First, it seemed to be another heresy of Eastern origin, like those plaguing twelfth-century Europe; as such it was less important than the Manichean error of Catharism, which indeed received more attention than Islam. The second reason for the growth of a polemical interest in Islam is the profound cultural and intellectual influence the Muslim world was exercising on Latin Europe in the twelfth century: notably through trade and through the translations of scientific and philosophical works from Arabic to Latin. Confronted with a thriving, prosperous, intellectually sophisticated Muslim world, the Christian polemicist needed to convince his readers that the “heresy of Muhammad” was a debased parody of the true religion. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 885

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the pattern in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ about how moral panics are really about status and identity signaling — here the polemic against Islam is a defensive reaction to a culturally superior rival.
• SEED: Angle for an article: how intellectual insecurity about a culturally superior rival drives polemical attacks — the twelfth-century Latin church disparaging Islamic learning it was simultaneously translating and benefiting from.