Medieval Christians dismissed Quranic revelation as a literary fiction

Evidence

Peter the Venerable used some phrases that are of interest: he spoke of Muhammad’s ‘pretending that God was speaking to him’ and of ‘that evil and lying man, introducing God speaking to him, like a poetic figment’. The words ‘poetic figment’ seem barely appropriate, and were no doubt called forth by the sense of theological irritation. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 215

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Poetic figment’ was how Peter the Venerable framed the Quran — treating Muhammad as an author rather than a channel, an interesting early ‘Quran-as-literature’ stance.
• XREF: connects to: Mediaeval Christian polemicists dismissed Quranic metaphors by misreading them as literal physics; Medieval attacks on the Qur’an obscured its evident piety to unlearned readers