Medieval Christian polemicists routinely misattributed miracle claims to the Qur’an to vilify Islam.

Evidence

It is interesting to compare what Ricoldo had to say. His summary of the Qur’anic denial of miracles reveals commoner, less authentic sources. Moses and Christ were not believed; God for that reason did not permit Muhammad miracles, but instead he came ‘in the strength of arms’. Ricoldo contrasted Christianity, which converted the world by persuasion. Logically this must have been either with, or without, the help of miracles; if without, that were the greater miracle, since it is a creed of self-denial. In either alternative, it can be seen that Christianity is based on astonishing miracles, stupendis miraculis esse fundatam. … Ricoldo, in the Itinerarium, began with assurance that masked inaccuracy. ‘Indeed Muhammad himself says in the chapter al-qamr, which means moon, that the moon was cut up in his time, and half fell on one mountain …’ In the Disputatio he admitted that the miracle was only clearly claimed by the commentators, and by the Qur’an itself just vaguely. In both accounts he blurred the distinction between the Islamic assertion and the Qur’anic denial, which, from the Christian point of view, is the only point of the story. Ricoldo’s statement owes its unfairness and obscurity to the Contrarietas; it comes in a chapter devoted to proving Islam to be ‘mendacissima’; Ricoldo was not the first or the last to do so, in good faith or ill, mendaciously. Both he and the author of the reprobatio concluded by stressing physical and historical arguments to disprove the alleged miracle; the one said that, as the moon is not a heavy body, it could not fall, the other that, as it is larger than the earth, it could not fall on a part of the earth only; both said that such a thing could not have happened unknown to all the world, and unrecorded. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 437

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reading on how polemicists distort sources (runs parallel to argumentative-bias themes in other readings on medieval religious controversy).
• SHARE: For anyone studying medieval Christian-Muslim polemics: the physical argument that the moon is larger than earth so couldn’t fall on part of it.