Medieval Christian polemicists attributed to Muslims arguments the Muslims did not hold.

Evidence

Finally, there was the idea, a development of Mark’s, that Islam accepted the Gospel as a divine revelation which proved too hard and was remitted in favour of the Qur’an, which it was not beyond man’s capacity to observe. Muslims claimed that ’… . the Gospel contains such difficult and such perfect things that the world was not great enough to achieve them’. Who, for example, could love his neighbour, or pray for his persecutors? ‘Because it was not a religion that could be commonly observed, God provided for the world - with a religion of salvation —- and tempered the commandments; he gave the world the Qur’an, which does not contain’! these difficult things, but things that are easy for salvation.’ Against this supposed Islamic position Ricoldo had no difficulty in arguing the impossibility of God’s not having known what He was doing when He gave the Gospel to men; he was, after all, attacking a position that he attributed to his adversary, not one the adversary admitted. Unwilling to let well alone, he also argued that the Islamic religion, though so much easier than the Christians, could fairly have been made easier yet; imperfect in all things, it was even imperfectly easy.’? This last point shows that the author, in spite of himself, did not really think Islam just a systematised licence at all. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 868

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s existing claims about how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — here the pattern is Christians demolishing a strawman position they invented, showing constructed ‘Islam’ functions as a rhetorical foil rather than empirical description.