Medieval Christians held an irreducibly equivocal attitude toward Qur’anic Christology

Evidence

There is nothing else in all the Qur’an to parallel the warmth with which Christ and His mother are spoken of. Christ is presented as an unique being, but His mother’s personality appears more vividly. The Qur’an inspires a devotion to Mary of which Muslims might have made more, if they had not needed to differentiate their attitude sharply from that of Catholics. … The problem for Christians who meditate upon Islam without prejudice is not at all an easy one. The Christ of the Qur’an is not the Christ in whom they believe, and yet there is only one Christ, whose praise must always be grateful to Christian ears. It cannot logically be less grateful when it is uttered by those who have seriously erroneous ideas about Him; but in matters that they feel to be important, people are not logical. … The Christian attitude to Muslims, who revered the sacred persons, but did so in highly erroneous forms, was inevitably equivocal. Christians were torn in a matter that affected them deeply. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 969

Categorization

• XREF: The equivocation over shared referents who ‘are not logically the same’ parallels the vault’s Jew-Arab genealogy where a single figure is split into self and constitutive outside.