Medieval Christians built ‘antihagiography’ of Muhammad’s death to mirror saintly death narratives

Evidence

The deaths of the saints were thought specially significant by their biographers, and in mediaeval tradition the death of Muhammad, the antithesis of the saint, was considered a subject of theological importance. It was often shown as having been atrociously horrible, sometimes simply as just having been human, with no signs of God’s special mercy. The methods of antihagiography necessarily varied according to how far the author was bound by knowledge of facts which Islamic sources established. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 592

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of ‘antihagiography’ — a structured inversion of hagiography as a polemical genre.
• SEED: Antihagiography as a method could seed a piece on how polemics structurally mirror the genres they attack — biography, tribute, eulogy inverted.