Medieval Christian polemic against Islam recycled a narrow stock of weak logical templates

Evidence

Ricoldo seems to combine Marti’s argument with those of the Contrarietas (cap. 11); as usual, it is to the latter that he was principally indebted. Thus he argued, as Marti had done, that the Gospel was incorrupt in Muhammad’s time, and also that Christians and Jews were permanent guarantors of the text of Scripture. But the actual arguments employed are inferior; they are repetitive, arguments of the aut-aut type, seeking to impose a generally unreal logical dilemma on the opponent; finally, they sometimes treat unlikely alternatives as seriously important ones. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1972

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that Christian-Jewish-Muslim polemic runs on recycled weak templates to reassert Christian textual priority parallels Anidjar’s genealogy of how adversary categories (Jew/Arab) are mutually constituted through textual authority disputes.