Medieval Christian writers sided with Muhammad’s persecutors over his believers

Evidence

There is something in this of the distrust felt by the citizen for the desert nomad, made to serve a polemic end. There was sympathy for the Meccans who persecuted their Prophet, for the merchants who disbelieved, and contempt for the foolish simplicity of the Medinans and the desert people, the rustics who believed. The actual differences between Mecca and Medina, and the presence of the Jews at Medina, were known, but were usually much confused. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 454

Categorization

• XREF: Citizen-versus-nomad distrust as polemic echoes contemporary constructions of Muslims as pre-modern outsiders, relevant to the vault’s ‘constitutive outside’ thread.