Medieval Christian polemicists explained Muhammad’s prophethood as demonic possession

Evidence

Bacon was not very close to Islam, nor particularly fully informed, but he had thought more than San Pedro about the general problems of comparative religion. It is interesting that both should have fallen back upon demoniac possession as the final explanation of a prophethood partly, but not wholly, explicable as feigned. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 194

San Pedro pointed out that really Muhammad was taught by a false monk, but himself always claimed that Gabriel appeared to him, and flattered Khadijah by telling her that Gabriel ordered him to assure her of salvation. In several places San Pedro referred incidentally to Muhammad as one possessed, and he let no opportunity go of drawing attention to a demoniac element, or suggestion, in any Arabic account. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 188

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the vault’s genealogy of how ‘Islam’ gets constructed as the West’s constitutive other — here at the level of medieval polemic rather than modern law.
• QUESTION: The ‘false monk’ trope resurrects the Bahira legend; worth tracing how this contrasts with the vault’s Jew-Arab enemy construction.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 194; Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 188