Medieval Spanish rulers used anti-Islam polemic to justify rule over subject Muslims

Evidence

Where Guibert de Nogent used the polemical biography of Muhammad to justify the conquests of the first Crusade, Alfonso deploys the same traditions as the foundation of his own power over subject Muslims. Here is a clear example of the kind of discourse that Edward Said decried in nineteenth-century apologists for British and French empire: a derogatory portrayal of Islam as a basis for the military and political domination of Muslims. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 907

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Edward Said’s Orientalism — Tolan is explicitly invoking his framework, connecting medieval Iberia to nineteenth-century imperial apologetics.

Related

• The negative portrait of Islam underwrote Christian imperial rule centuries before modern empire (similarity 0.89)
• Anti-Muslim polemics legitimated Christian subjugation of Spanish Muslims (similarity 0.87)
• Anti-Muslim polemic justified the subjugation of Spanish Muslims and denied their rule legitimacy (similarity 0.86)
• Intellectual polemic and violent crusade coexisted as tools in the thirteenth-century West (similarity 0.82)
• Castilian translations of the Koran and Mi’raj served anti-Muslim polemic (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval anti-Saracen textual traditions survived unbroken into modern orientalism (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-Islam polemic was not required to justify thirteenth-century crusading ideology. (similarity 0.80)
• Early Spanish chroniclers judged Muslim rulers by the same criteria as Christian kings (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval polemicists cast Muhammad as a failed Antichrist to explain Islam’s spread (similarity 0.80)
• Muslims dominated Spanish intellectual and cultural life from the ninth century on (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval polemic attacked Muslim aspects that scandalized Christian observers (similarity 0.80)
• Systematic theological anti-Islam polemic emerged only under Muslim rule (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval Christian anti-Muslim discourse preceded Said’s orientalism by centuries (similarity 0.80)
• Alfonso’s ideology assembled preexisting anti-Islamic polemical strands rather than originating them (similarity 0.79)
• Muslims held cultural and intellectual dominance in Spain through the thirteenth century (similarity 0.79)