Muslim courtesy silence in disputations was misread by Christians as intellectual defeat

Evidence

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

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s interest in how the dominated party in an encounter gets re-described; echoes Aziz’s work on how Muslim conduct gets reinterpreted to fit the racial-muslim frame.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the misreading of Muslim tactical silence for intellectual defeat parallel modern misreadings of Muslim non-engagement as evasiveness?