Medieval polemicists used decontextualized commentary to render Qur’anic passages scandalous

Evidence

Every reader of the Qur’an, whether in Ketton’s translation or in Mark’s, or in major extracts quoted by other authors, must have received a strong impression of piety and moral injunction, and it was in fact just this that was so often denounced as a trap for the unwary. A great deal of what was written about Islam consisted in attacks upon the Qur’an; it is possible to forget that it was often not self-evident to the uninstructed reader that what was attacked was objectionable. Even the passages in stirah xxxuI which refer to the story of Zayd and Zaynab and in siirah Lxvi which deal with that of Mariyah would not seem so iniquitous if there were no commentary to explain their contexts - from the point of view of modern scholarship, to distort these. Muslim commentators are accustomed to explain the occasions of different revelations, and Christians would do so too, in order to discredit them. Except where this could be done, the Qur’4n must have seemed predominantly a work of piety, and after all not so unlike the later prophecies of the Old Testament. It must have tended to give a good impression, which we may assume it was part of the purpose of the polemists to obliterate. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1126

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the vault’s Aziz/Razack cluster: here the fabrication works by selective framing rather than sheer invention — ‘Islam’ as Other requires active misreading labor, paralleling how ‘the Racial Muslim’ is constructed by selective state attention rather than neutral description.
• DEFINE: Defines the polemical technique: obiter dicta about ‘occasions of revelation’ are weaponized in reverse to vilify scripture.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a text only becomes ‘objectionable’ through someone’s commentary — and that scholarly apparatus itself does the distorting — is dense and ranks near the top for the chapter’s method.