Medieval Christian polemic constructed Islam for Christian audiences, not from Muslim sources.

Evidence

Marti cited the argument that one should consult the farmer about agriculture and the doctor about medicine; it is ironic that the failure to find out what Muslims themselves asserted to be their beliefs should have been characteristic of Christian polemic. A brilliant Christian writer perceived what was far from obvious to his contemporaries: ‘if Christians deny the histories of the Muslims and the Jews’, said Bacon, who never, so far as we know, had the opportunity personally to speak to a Muslim, ‘they, by the same right, will deny the histories of the Christians’.1* The invariable tendency to neglect what the Qur’an meant, or what Muslims thought it meant, or what Muslims thought or did in any given circumstances, necessarily implies that Qur’anic and other Islamic doctrine was presented only in a form that would convince Christians; and more and more extravagant forms would stand a chance of acceptance as the distance of writers and public from the Islamic border increased. It was with very great reluctance that what Muslims said Muslims believed was accepted as what they did believe. There was a Christian picture in which the details (even under the pressure of facts) were abandoned as little as possible, and in which the general outline was never abandoned. … All the corrections that were made in the interests of an increasing accuracy were only a defence of what had newly been realised to be vulnerable, a shoring up of a weakened structure. Christian opinion was an erection which could not be demolished, even to be rebuilt. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1440

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the vault cluster on how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside (Anidjar, Aziz, Razack) — this is a premodern genealogy of misrepresentation-as-epistemic-structure.
• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘distance-from-border’ dynamic — misrepresentation grows more extravagant the farther writers and public are from actual contact — as a technology that recurs across orientalist and contemporary Islamophobic discourse.
• DEEPTHINKING: The picture of Christian opinion as an indestructible erection whose outline can never be abandoned even when details give way under factual pressure is a dense model of ideological persistence worth sitting with.