Medieval authors fabricated conversion stories to lend polemics spurious authority

Evidence

The Contrarietas claims to be written by a convert from Islam, but it seems to me to be possible that it is really by a Christian who wished to give it greater authority by such a fictional claim. It is often difficult to imagine that a convert, however much he hated his old religion, could take just the line that the author of this work takes; and the Mecca pilgrimage that he claims to have made is particularly unconvincing. Pedro de Alfonso again and again reminds us by something that he says that he was once a Jew; there is nothing comparable in this other case. On the other hand, this author’s knowledge of the Qur’an was sound and we must suppose him at least to have lived for many years among Muslims on reasonable terms of intimacy. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 92

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to modern fabricated insider narratives in journalism and memoir, where authenticity is borrowed from a claimed insider identity.