Medieval church leaders disagreed over whether studying Islam was safe

Evidence

In correspondence with the great Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter confided that he was still undecided whether the Muslims were heretics or pagans. Bernard (and he probably represented majority opinion in this respect) was hostile to Peter’s interest in Islamic lore. Bernard seems to have thought that the best way of dealing with Islamic doctrine was to ignore it altogether. In the centuries to come there would be many Christians who argued that those who studied and translated the books of the Muslims ran the risk of being infected by them. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 60

Categorization

• QUESTION: The idea that reading ‘the enemy’s’ books infects the reader is an early epistemology-of-contagion claim — worth tracing how it evolved.

Related

• Medieval Christian knowledge of Islam served polemics, not understanding (similarity 0.78)
• Medieval theorists assumed Muslim culpability rather than argued it (similarity 0.78)