Medieval Christian refutation of Islam reused the same failed strategy for 150 years.

Evidence

Since the Koran itself testifies to the authority of the Gospel, Riccoldo continues, Scripture too can be used to disprove the Koran: “one must concentrate on the refutation of such a perfidious law and show that it is not a law of God, and that the Saracens ought to accept the authority of the Gospels and the Old Testaments. We can prove this using the Koran itself, just as Goliath was killed with his own sword.” The strategy he is describing is essentially that of Peter the Venerable: use the Koran to prove the superior authority of the Bible, then use the Bible to attack Muhammad and the Koran and to prove the truth of Christianity. In the more than 150 years since Peter’s Contra sectam, despite the work of scores of Dominican missionaries, despite schooling in Arabic and in Muslim philosophy and theology, the strategy is the same, and the results will be the same: the Dominican missions to Islam are a failure. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1263

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how an intellectual strategy persists and fails across centuries precisely because its practitioners never revise the founding assumption — medieval Dominican missions to Islam as a case study in institutional inertia.