Medieval anti-Islam polemic staged debates no Muslim could answer

Evidence

There was always a Muslim ‘reader over the shoulder’; not a real one, of course, but one whom the Christian imagination created. He was unreal because he never objected to what was asserted against him. There was a remarkably wide use of the logical dilemma as a dialectical device, almost as a literary form, and there was more than a suggestion of the atmosphere of public challenge and debate. The mediaeval Latins seem always to be defending a public dissertation before favourable judges, judges whose approval has been assured in advance. It is a nightmare reversed: it is the opponent who cannot answer, except in words set in his mouth; it is a race in which the jockey on the rival horse is a dummy. Much of the literature about Islam seems to consist of debating points triumphantly enunciated and, of course, never answered, because the opponent is absent; and it is this which gives an air of unreality to so much of it. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1420

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘reader over the shoulder’ and ‘nightmare reversed’ — polemic as a staged debate against an absent, pre-defeated opponent — is a genuinely luminous insight into how contestatory writing manufactures its own unreality.
• XREF: connects to: Medieval disputation records were largely constructed strawman debates; Medieval polemicists recycled general accusations of Muslim vice without personal knowledge; Vincent’s anti-Islamic method was data-driven rather than argumentative (+1 more)