Medieval Christian polemicists deliberately cherry-picked Hadith for shock value rather than understanding
Evidence
First Martí concedes that in some things Muhammad was truthful: here he gives a (now-familiar) list of Koranic precepts that are in agreement with Christian doctrine: the unity of God, the Virgin birth, the praise of Jesus and the Gospel, and so on. “Yet many of his words were false”14: the Koran claims that the Virgin Mary was the sister of Aaron, that Jesus announced the arrival of Muhammad, and that Jesus was not really crucified. Here, too, under the rubric of Muhammad’s “lies,” Martí presents the Muslim paradise, full of the pleasures of eating and love-making, and contrasts it with the pure and austere heaven of Paul and the Gospels. Martí also gleans some sayings attributed to Muhammad in the Hadîth collections of al-Bukhâri and Muslim b. al-Hajjâj: that flies wings’ contain poison and that the day of judgement would come within one hundred years of Muhammad. The choice of passages clearly shows the polemical purpose; by pouncing on whatever he finds to be shocking or ridiculous, he can conclude, “all these things seem to be the words of a stupid man or a scoffer rather than a prophet or messenger of God.” (De seta, 32). The purpose is not to understand Islam but to vilify it. While this could no doubt evoke nods of approbation from fellow Dominican missionaries, it is hard to imagine Muslims being convinced through such an arbitrary and hostile selection of Hadîth passages. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1199
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader theme of cross-faith polemic vs. understanding, and to moral-panic scholarship on how cherry-picked evidence serves a predetermined conclusion. — connects to: Christian polemists preferred their own readings over traditional Islamic interpretation; Medieval Christians weaponized accurate Islamic learning for polemics; Christian polemicists read Muslim sources as unwittingly confirming Christian legends — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1314 (+3 more)