Medieval Christian writers distorted Islam where accuracy served polemic

Evidence

Only in matters apparently favourable to Christianity was a very high degree of accuracy achieved, as, for example, in treating the Qur’anic beliefs about Christ and His mother. This draws attention to the motives underlying inaccuracies on themes where there was conflict. Accuracy in the one case, inaccuracy in the other, were equally useful in support of Christian belief. The process of misrepresentation did not extend, with authors who were conceivably in a position to know better, so far as to make their picture of Islam unrecognisable, but it nevertheless needs explaining. We have no right to assume that intellectual dishonesty was involved, until every other explanation has been sought in vain. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1367

When Viterbo said that Muhammad’s mother was a Jewess, his father a pagan, he may have reflected confusedly this already confused description. Mark of Toledo said that Mecca means adulteria (moecha): ‘who, leaving God, her lawful husband, like a prostitute, and substituting many gods to herself, perpetrated an impious adultery’. … A description in the Historia Arabum of the rebuilding of the Ka’bah in pagan times speaks of this shrine as a church; yet the account is clearly based on a Muslim source deriving ultimately from ibn Ishaq. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 455

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault cluster on how Islam is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — here the ‘constitutive outside’ is built by deliberate representational distortion rather than mere ignorance.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1367; Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 455