Medieval Christian polemicists refused Muslim sources on Muhammad’s life on principle

Evidence

In order to prove that Muhammad is indeed Antichrist, one has to know something of his biography. Alvarus and Eulogius are of course not about to ask the Muslims themselves; who would trust a life of Antichrist written by his acolytes? On the contrary, Eulogius discourages dialogue with Muslims; one must learn about the false prophet from trustworthy Christians: which is to say, for Eulogius, from Christians untainted by contact with Muslims. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 524

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• QUESTION: Does this ‘only enemies write truthfully about the enemy’s founder’ epistemic rule have parallels in any modern religious or political polemic?

Related

• Medieval Christians refused Muslim sources for knowledge of Muhammad as untrustworthy. (similarity 0.93)
• Medieval Christian polemicists investigated Muhammad’s claims carefully rather than dismissing them (similarity 0.85)
• Medieval Christians deemed even truthful statements by Muhammad untrustworthy (similarity 0.84)
• Medieval Christian polemic sources included absurd pseudomiracles about Muhammad. (similarity 0.84)
• Christian polemics against Muhammad aimed to reassure Christians, not convert Muslims (similarity 0.84)
• Medieval Christian polemicists weaponised Muslims’ own sources against Islam. (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval polemicists attacked the Qur’an with pedantic misreadings to prove Muhammad misunderstood truths (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval polemic framed Muhammad as Antichrist figure and Islam’s spread as fraud’s persistence (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval polemicists cast Muhammad as a failed Antichrist to explain Islam’s spread (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval Christians actively preferred false anti-Muhammad accounts over true ones (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval Christians polemicists routinely conflated the Qur’an with reported sayings of Muhammad (similarity 0.83)
• The claim that Muslims refuse to dispute became Christian dogma (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval Christian polemicists attacked Islam with knowingly false evidence (similarity 0.83)
• Twelfth-century Christian polemic against Islam argued Muhammad failed the Old Testament prophetic test. (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval polemicists quietly dropped claims lacking cross-tradition confirmation (similarity 0.82)