Medieval Christian polemicists weaponised Muslims’ own sources against Islam.

Evidence

His own summary of the stories he had selected from Muslim sources to illustrate the life of the Prophet is instructive in this connection. A consideration, he said, of what he had taken from the Qur’an and the other books of the Muslims would show that Muhammad was demoniac, and that he admitted to the Meccans that he was not sent to work miracles. It would show that the Meccans reproached him for claiming as a revelation from God what it was known ‘a certain man’ had taught him; that he killed one Jew treacherously, as well as other Jews who accepted his dominion; that he took as wife a beautiful Jewess, the ‘lady’ (i.e. feudal lady) of the Jews, after killing the men and making the women and children prisoners. Muhammad called himself messenger of God, yet seduced the wives of his own people, and in God’s name invented a law to justify his being allowed whatever he desired. … What is certain is that the two series of historical assertions, Christian and Muslim, seemed to him constantly and significantly to echo each other. This did not mean that he was prepared to commit himself to the truth of any single ‘Christian’ assertion. He could not deny himself the pleasure of recounting any tale derogatory to the Prophet’s honour, but those that found no apparent Muslim confirmation he was content, once told, to forget; and even where there was this ‘confirmation’ he seems rather to have hoped, than to have been confident, that the legends circulating in Christendom were true. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1315

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s Anidjar thread on how the enemy is constructed through its own self-descriptions being turned against it — here Christians read Muslim sources as self-condemnation rather than evidence.
• SHARE: For anyone studying Christian-Muslim polemic: the technique of mining the adversary’s own scripture for self-damning ‘admissions’ that need no external verification.