Medieval Christians polemicists routinely conflated the Qur’an with reported sayings of Muhammad

Evidence

His criticism that the Qur’anic story of Christ was as hard to believe as the Christian one was fair; but he would also use Qur’anic passages to make points of startling pedantry. For example, he pointed out that when the Qur’an said that the Jews claimed to have killed the Messias, Jesus, it was quite in error, because the Jews did not believe that Jesus was the Messias. It was the heart of his argument that Muhammad did not understand the truths that he sometimes enunciated; he ‘spoke the truth… but he did not understand’. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 953 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Medieval Christian polemic interpreted Qur’anic texts as nastily as possible; Medieval polemicists attacked the Qur’an with pedantic misreadings to prove Muhammad misunderstood truths — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 953; Medieval European conflation of Qur’an and Traditions may have been a deliberate polemic tactic

Related

• Medieval polemicists attacked the Qur’an with pedantic misreadings to prove Muhammad misunderstood truths (similarity 0.94)
• Medieval attacks on the Qur’an obscured its evident piety to unlearned readers (similarity 0.91)
• Medieval Christian polemic interpreted Qur’anic texts as nastily as possible (similarity 0.90)
• Mediaeval Christian polemicists dismissed Quranic metaphors by misreading them as literal physics (similarity 0.89)
• Medieval polemicists quoted the Qur’an inaccurately without scruple (similarity 0.89)
• Medieval Christian polemics held that Qur’anic truths served only as bait for deception. (similarity 0.88)
• Medieval European conflation of Qur’an and Traditions may have been a deliberate polemic tactic (similarity 0.88)
• Christian annotators charged the Quran with self-contradiction on points later seen as mere nuance (similarity 0.87)
• Medieval polemicists conflated Qur’an and hadith authorship by Muhammad (similarity 0.87)
• Medieval Christians admitted the Qur’an as an authority only where useful to their polemic (similarity 0.87)
• Medieval Christian polemicists built their case on Muhammad’s alleged self-contradiction (similarity 0.87)
• Medieval Christian readers judged the Qur’an by its Christology (similarity 0.86)
• Medieval polemicists quietly dropped claims lacking cross-tradition confirmation (similarity 0.86)
• Christian polemicists charged the Qur’an with asserting and denying the same doctrines. (similarity 0.86)
• Medieval Christian polemicists treated Christian and Muslim legends as mutually confirmatory (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Medieval European conflation of Qur’an and Traditions may have been a deliberate polemic tactic #expands (0.85)
• Medieval polemicists attacked the Qur’an with pedantic misreadings to prove Muhammad misunderstood truths #expands (0.82) — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 953