Medieval Christian deformation of Islam coexisted with accurate knowledge

Evidence

For the Latin, it was an impossible imaginative effort so to suspend belief that this association of sacred names, which includes the most sacred of all, could seem anything but grotesque; yet it would be a mistake to imagine that mediaeval writers were illinformed. There is evidence that they believed as much as they were willing to believe, and all who knew the Islamic reassessment of the familiar sequence of God’s servants found it intolerable. As a result, Islam was often deformed when it was presented by Christians. In spite of this, the basic tenets of Islam were well understood by a great number of writers. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 109

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the vault’s claim (from Anidjar and Aziz) that the construction of Islam as the West’s outside is not a product of ignorance but of interest/disavowal — here ‘they believed as much as they were willing to believe’ names a motivated refusal, not a knowledge gap.
• DEEPTHINKING: Distinguishes deformation from misinformation — a wilful reframing of the familiar sacred sequence that knowledge did nothing to correct — a genuinely counterintuitive relation between knowing and representing the religious Other.