Muslim courteous silence in debates was misread as inability to answer

Evidence

There are many reasons why Christians may have been unable to distinguish under (a) or have been deluded under (6). As far as the latter is concerned there seems often to have been the aim on the Muslim side to avoid controversy which would be bound to lead to trouble for the Christian concerned, and silence that was really due to kindness may have been mistaken for inability to reply. The proof of this is that we cannot assume that any Muslim would have been silenced by any argument to which there is a fairly obvious answer from a Muslim point of view. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 2414

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how a dominant group systematically misreads the minority’s strategic silence as intellectual defeat — with the medieval Christian-Muslim debate as the test case.
• QUESTION: Worth tracing how the asymmetry — Christians seeing silence as defeat, Muslims using silence as protection — plays out in other colonial or missionary encounters.
• XREF: connects to: Islamic refusal to dispute likely stemmed from caution, not fear of reason; Muslims’ well-meaning silence in religious debates was often misread by Christians as defeat.