Medieval polemic staged an imaginary Muslim opponent who could never answer

Evidence

There was always a Muslim ‘reader over the shoulder’; not a real one, of course, but one whom the Christian imagination created. He was unreal because he never objected to what was asserted against him. … The mediaeval Latins seem always to be defending a public dissertation before favourable judges, judges whose approval has been assured in advance. It is a nightmare reversed: it is the opponent who cannot answer, except in words set in his mouth; it is a race in which the jockey on the rival horse is a dummy. Much of the literature about Islam seems to consist of debating points triumphantly enunciated and, of course, never answered, because the opponent is absent; and it is this which gives an air of unreality to so much of it. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1420

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the vault’s core claim in Anidjar that ‘Islam’ is constituted as a rhetorical figure produced in the Western imaginary — a dummy interlocutor. Also resonates with how Said frames Orientalist discourse as monologue to an absent East.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this ‘dummy opponent’ rhetoric persist in modern framing of Islam in Western public debate, i.e. Islam as incapable of self-answering critique?
• FICTION: The image of the unchallenged dissertation before pre-assured judges — the dummy jockey in the race — could seed a fiction about a public debate where the opposing side is literally a constructed stand-in.