Medieval Christian polemics held that Qur’anic truths served only as bait for deception.

Evidence

This idea frequently recurred. The misuse of truth had converted the ‘uncertain hearts’ of half-convinced Arabs; Muhammad ‘mixed some worthy things with the shameful, that he might the more cunningly pass the poison mixed with honey’; the infancy miracles were introduced into the Qur’an to attract innocent Christians by praising Christ … In that religion there are both many truths inserted into the lies, and good things mixed with the bad, even with malice to deceive: namely, so that the false things should be believed because of the true, or else that the bad things should be received because of the good. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 902

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s Islamophobia thread — this is the premodern genealogy of how Islam gets constituted as the West’s deceptive outside, anticipating later claims about Islam as inherently untrustworthy.
• DEFINE: Exemplifies the ‘truth-as-poison-bait’ trope: a definitional pattern of how medieval polemic constructed the relationship between truth and falsehood within Islam.