Medieval anti-Islamic ‘debates’ were imagined fictions, not real events

Evidence

This is not to imply that Christian polemists who thought in terms of debate with Muslims were hypocritical. Possibly they deceived themselves. They planned and imagined debates ‘that might take place. This was entirely in the air; there was a general intention but no concrete actualisation. Thus mediaevals, radically anxious to speak on sound authority, and creditably so, signally failed to find what they claimed to have found: authorities that Muslims really would accept, or arguments that would stand up in debate before an outside witness. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1461

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the production-of-knowledge critique in the vault — the ‘debate’ is an internal Christian genre, not an exchange with Muslims, echoing how contemporary ‘Islam’ discourse addresses a Western audience rather than Muslims.