Local Oriental Christians transmitted moribund anti-Islamic prejudice to European missionaries

Evidence

From the seventeenth century onwards, the original influence of Oriental Christianity had been reinfused into Western thought; from the time of Napoleon particularly, more and more Europeans travelled and resided in Islamic countries. Missionaries and others, both Catholic and Protestant, were largely dependent upon local Christians, among whom their work lay often almost exclusively. Oriental Christians revived in their visitors moribund prejudices which ultimately, if deviously, derived from the same sources as their own. Western religious circles at home were particularly vulnerable, and these ideas were reflected in the world of scholarship. Within our own lifetimes scholars have managed to maintain judgements that are not fundamentally different from the mediaeval judgements. Even with the facts that are now accepted, and which often they themselves established, such great men as D. S. Margoliouth, Sir William Muir and Pere Lammens have maintained an attitude that is not fundamentally sympathetic to Muhammad or to Islam. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1601

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s stated purpose: this is a concrete mechanism by which the constitutive-outside construction of Islam gets channeled through local intermediaries — compare with how colonized intermediaries function in Aziz’s and Razack’s accounts.
• QUESTION: A striking mechanism worth chasing: how Eastern Christians, via missionary dependence, reinfused supposedly superseded medieval prejudice into ‘modern’ scholarship. Who were these local Christians and what interests drove the transmission?