Medieval Christians valued Qur’anic Christology over its proclamation of divine unity.

Evidence

The acceptance of Christ as a prophet and the denial of His Godhead seemed in the Middle Ages to be the most important aspect of the Qur’anic mixture of truth and untruth. The approach was generally an analytical one which attempted to formulate the Christological doctrine of the Qur’an in terms readily intelligible to Christians. This subject was given much more attention, and was clearly considered much more significant, than the Islamic proclamation of the unity of God. The latter was barely considered a fit subject for prophecy at all; it was elementary, and it was attainable by reason. It was the approximation to the revealed truths of Christian faith that was of interest to Christians, and the Qur’anic references to Gospel stories were characteristically seen as the praise of Christ. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 920

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates the vault’s theme that the West’s engagement with Islam is mediated through its own theological categories — Islam only signified where it approximated Christian revelation.