Medieval thinkers strained to fit Muslims into a divinely ordained history

Evidence

These thirteenth-century authors, like those of previous centuries, attempted to place the tumultuous events around them into God’s plan. As always, one of the most difficult things to explain was the complex net of relations between God, his chosen people, and his enemies. What was one to think of Muslims? (Or Mongols, heretics, or Jews?) How to place them in the divinely ordained march of history? — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1090

Categorization

• XREF: Frames the medieval question of where Muslims sit in sacred history — the ancestral puzzle behind the modern oppositional categories Anidjar diagnoses. Reads Muslims, Mongols, heretics, and Jews as structurally interchangeable outliers of Christian salvation history. — connects to: Dante’s contradictory treatment of Muslims reflects a transitional medieval-to-humanist ideological moment — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 774