Medieval Christian anxiety centered on Islam’s denial of Jesus’ divinity

Evidence

What troubled Riccoldo most is that God should permit (even seem to condone) the “blasphemies” of the Koran. “As You know, frequently, as I read the Koran in Arabic, with great grief and impatience in my heart, I would place this book on Your altar, before the image of You and your holy mother and say: ‘Read! Read what Muhammad says!’ And it seemed to me that You did not want to read.” The “blasphemies” that shock him so, are, among others, that Jesus is man, not God; that he was in fact a Muslim who never claimed to be God; that the apostles, Abraham, and other biblical figures were Muslim. These are by and large the same ideas that shocked the anonymous annotator of Robert of Ketton’s Latin translation of the Koran. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1242

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the specifically Christological core of medieval anti-Islamic polemic, grounding vault claims about Islamophobia’s genealogical origins.