Medieval chivalric culture dehumanized Islam partly to evade its theological claims

Evidence

What is certain is that throughout this period every author with some pretensions to accuracy, that is, every writer who gave the matter more than a passing glance, thought that Islam stood as a third religion, as distinct from paganism as Christianity and Judaism are distinct from it, and that historically Muhammad called the Arabs away from idolatry. Whether in the Latin Kingdom or in remoter Europe, a chivalric audience — nobles and their military retainers and their women — was naturally content with an unreal and romantic attitude which dehumanised an enemy, and which, while it ignored accuracy, by that means avoided those questions of theology which appealed to the scholastic. No serious writer doubted that Islam proclaims the one God. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1772

Categorization

• XREF: This prefigures the vault’s claim about how ‘Islam’ gets constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — the chivalric dehumanization of an enemy coupled with avoidance of genuine theological engagement parallels Anidjar’s and Razack’s genealogies. Here the distorting frame operates even while serious writers affirm Islam’s monotheism.