Medieval Christian readers preferred easily ridiculed Islamic legends over the faithful Qur’an translation.

Evidence

Although facts were sometimes more popular than argumentation, yet facts which stated a case had an attraction at the expense of such as did not. The Cluniac Qur’an might have been used as a mine of information about the Prophet’s life, but it does not seem to have contributed either to Cluniac or to other biographies. Verses of the Qur’an which relate to historical events were not polemically utilised until the thirteenth century in the West. There was a very limited interest in some of the other Cluniac translations, but, apart from the Risalah, the de doctrina Machometi was a rich source of largely legendary, while authentically Islamic, material about Muhammad. Both it and the Liber Scalae Machometi were more popular sources of information about Muhammad than the Qur’an, because they could be more easily ridiculed. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1303

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: what it reveals about how polemic consumers choose sources — people read what confirms and entertains rather than what informs, even when accurate material is freely available.