Medieval Christians imagined Islam as apostasy from Christianity, not a pagan-native faith

Evidence

The fable to the contrary which imagined Islam to be an apostasy from Christianity (often from a recent conversion) was largely literary. This bizarre tale must ultimately derive, in all the ramifications of its different forms, from the idea that Islam was formulated out of Christian dogmatic elements, and from the ever-present memory of those Christian provinces in Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Spain which the Christian world had in fact lost to Islam. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 472

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the vault’s Jew-Arab enemy genealogy by showing ‘the West’ also needed Islam as a Christian apostate/deviation rather than only an external heathen — a constitutive-inside framing that parallels how Anidjar traces Christianity’s construction of Islam as heretical other.