No era since the Middle Ages has discussed Islam outside prejudice and politics

Evidence

I have not been able to discover any period in European or American history since the Middle Ages in which Islam was generally discussed or thought about outside a framework created by passion, prejudice, and political interests. This may not seem a surprising discovery, but included in it is the entire gamut of scholarly and scientific disciplines which, since the early nineteenth century, have either called themselves collectively the discipline of Orientalism or have tried systematically to deal with the Orient. No one would disagree with the statement that early commentators on Islam like Peter the Venerable and Barthélemy d’Herbelot were passionate Christian polemicists in what they said. But it has been an unexamined assumption that since Europe and the West advanced into the modern scientific age and freed themselves of superstition and ignorance, the march must have included Orientalism. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 145

Related

• European study of Islam originates in fear, not curiosity, and that hostility persists today. (similarity 0.86)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.85)
• European scholarship on Islam turned disinterested only once Islam ceased threatening Europe. (similarity 0.84)
• Academic Islamic studies began only with eighteenth-century Orientalism (similarity 0.84)
• Islam has been framed by passion, prejudice, and political interests since the Middle Ages (similarity 0.83)
• Westerners encounter Islam only through pre-framed political and media channels. (similarity 0.83)
• The Encyclopaedia of Islam asked European questions, not Muslim ones, about Islam (similarity 0.83)
• European study of Islam originated in fear, not curiosity. (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist historiography reduces Islam to dynastic chronology while omitting its religious and doctrinal substance. (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s liberalism foreclosed any possibility that the Orient could instruct the West (similarity 0.83)
• Islam served as Europe’s principal civilizational other for centuries. (similarity 0.82)
• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.82)
• Islamic Orientalism resisted internal critique while cognate fields engaged it. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist categories can contradict what Muslims would say about themselves (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval Christian knowledge systems failed to explain or influence Islam (similarity 0.82)