Medieval critics charged the Qur’an with contradicting natural philosophy and simple logic.

Evidence

This treatment leads on to another great field in which the Qur’an was thought alien to Western tradition: its inconsistency with reason, that is, both with natural philosophers in moral and scientific matters, and with itself in simple logic. This was inevitably how it would strike a mediaeval reader trained in the schools. … In an unusually unreasonable marginal comment, the Annotator of Ketton castigated the ignorance of the physical world shown by the … Prophet who claimed that birds flying in the air are upheld by the power of God. Really air supports them just as water does the fish that swim in it; God made no special miracle for birds. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 357

Categorization

• SEED: The Annotator’s pedantic correction of the bird verse is a wonderful concrete case of how close theological reading operates: essay angle on why the most literal-minded reading of a rival scripture becomes the favored polemical weapon.
• XREF: connects to: Mediaeval critics mocked the Qur’an’s chapter names as irrational