Medieval Christian knowledge of Islam served polemics, not understanding

Evidence

It is certain that the essentials of Islamic belief were known to those scholastic and other educated authors who took a serious interest in the subject; much was even publicised by popular writers. There was not, of course, any very subtle appreciation of the niceties of Islamic doctrine, and there was not usually a great desire to understand what was known. We shall see that this knowledge served a polemic use, and that the data were assessed in ways which must be unacceptable to Muslims. There was more Christian propaganda than genuine attempt to communicate over the frontier. The physical frontier was not very clearly marked and was easily crossed. The frontier that divided the mental attitudes of Christians and Muslims was emphatically defined and crossed only with the greatest difficulty. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 267

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the vault cluster (Anidjar, Aziz, Razack) on how Islam is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside: here the physical frontier is porous while the mental frontier dividing Christian from Muslim is emphatic — a genealogy of the ‘Islam as constitutive outside’ trope.
• SHARE: The image of the easily-crossed physical frontier versus the emphatically-marked mental frontier would land for a medievalist colleague.