Medieval Christian polemic offered no common ground that could persuade Muslims.

Evidence

Argument taken from Scripture and argument about Scripture based upon a peculiar interpretation of the Qur’an were unlikely to impress Muslims at all. We shall see that this was also true of much historical analysis of the Prophet’s life. It is only in the field of moral philosophy that arguments were based on common ground, and the same weakness appears there, when data were defined by Christians without proof of their validity, still less of their acceptability by Muslims. We may say that it was absurd to insist on the absence of miracles in Islam, and yet to refuse to take seriously the Qur’anic argument that they were not needed, or that the Qur’an’s own inspiration was self-evident. If we say this we criticise anachronistically; our circumstances, which make this possible, are different. At that time in Europe too great an effort was required to understand the unfamiliar; and in Asia and Africa the same was true of Muslims. Common ground between Christian and Muslim, either to understand each other or to find mutually acceptable premises to justify rejection, was rarely sought, and, when sought, was sought half-heartedly and generally without success. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 448

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of interfaith polemic failing from absence of shared premises — echoes Robertson Smith / comparative religion debates and modern Christian-Muslim apologetics literature. — connects to: Scholarly polemic failed because it never spoke in terms Muslims could recognize; Medieval Christian polemic invented a silent Muslim opponent who never objected
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that polemic schemes are ‘well suited to convincing convinced Christians; hardly at all to real debate’ generalizes beyond theology to any closed in-group argument rooted in unexamined shared premises.