Medieval Christians actively preferred false anti-Muhammad accounts over true ones

Evidence

This was most true of revelations that allowed the Prophet marital privileges of one sort and another; many of these were invented by Christians, but such as were not were highly immoral in Christian eyes, especially when expressed in Christian terms. The two most important aspects of Muhammad’s life, Christians believed, were his sexual licence and his use of force to establish his religion. In order to preserve this picture unblurred it was often necessary to prefer a false account to a true one (as we to-day see it); certainly as many false but desirable elements as could by any means be believed were usually accepted. Even so, there was a wide difference between what could be believed by those who lived in the heart of Christendom and what those who lived within or upon the borders of dar al-Islam could believe. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1529

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the psychology of motivated reasoning in polemic more broadly — how a group’s need to defend its worldview overrides accuracy, echoing similar dynamics in modern political misinformation literature. — connects to: Medieval audiences preferred Islam accounts easier to ridicule over accurate ones
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the deliberate preference for false-but-useful narratives over true ones as a general mechanism of interreligious and political polemic, with the medieval anti-Muhammad case as the cleanest historical example.