Medieval Christians used the Qur’an’s poetic form to deny its divine status

Evidence

Ricoldo, however, followed by Peter, replied that in fact the very opposite is true: divine laws are not like this at all; neither the Old Testament nor the New is metrical [szc]; of ‘the other prophets who heard the voice of God’, we are told that ‘none said that God spoke in verse; which also the wise philosophers disdained’. The Qur’an itself admitted that the Prophet was accused of being a dreamer and a poet, and not a prophet.%* This was not the only occasion when a scholastic adopted the attitude that the Quraysh had taken up in Muhammad’s own day. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 339

Categorization

• QUESTION: The closing line that the scholastics adopted the Quraysh’s own attitude — Islamic tradition’s internal opponents — is a striking inversion worth chasing: Christians weaponized Muslim-internal doubts against the scripture.
• XREF: Corroborates the vault’s claim that ‘the West’ constructs Islam by re-deploying internal Islamic polemic/narrative against Muslims, parallel to how racialization borrows internal social categories.