Medieval polemicists attacked the Qur’an with pedantic misreadings to prove Muhammad misunderstood truths

Evidence

His criticism that the Qur’anic story of Christ was as hard to believe as the Christian one was fair; but he would also use Qur’anic passages to make points of startling pedantry. For example, he pointed out that when the Qur’an said that the Jews claimed to have killed the Messias, Jesus, it was quite in error, because the Jews did not believe that Jesus was the Messias. It was the heart of his argument that Muhammad did not understand the truths that he sometimes enunciated; he ‘spoke the truth… but he did not understand’. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 953

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the ‘he spoke the truth but did not understand it’ trope — a standard accusation in Christian polemics against Muhammad’s prophethood.
• XREF: connects to: Mediaeval critics mocked the Qur’an’s chapter names as irrational; Mediaeval Christian polemicists dismissed Quranic metaphors by misreading them as literal physics; Medieval attacks on the Qur’an obscured its evident piety to unlearned readers (+2 more)