Medieval Christian missionaries reconceived Muslim doctrines as partial truths to bridge toward conversion

Evidence

In one work alone, also a late one, Lull showed himself aware of what was really being said by Muslims. He wished, in this work, to meet them half-way. If they maintained that God has no equal, and neither generates nor is generated, Christians might agree that, understood corporally, this was true. If they maintained that Christ was not God, it might be argued that in so far as He was man (though not, of course, in so far as He was God) this also was true. This syllogistic solution - and it is nothing more — is typical of one aspect of Lullism, and does nothing to solve the problems; at the same time, it reveals Lull’s own personality at its most kindly and charitable, and points out a road of mutual understanding in discussion that both sides would always be very reluctant to follow. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 995

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s Islamophobia genealogy thread: here the ‘constitutive Muslim’ is not evil but willfully blind, a construct medieval polemicists built to be re-educated.