Polemic addressed to Muslims actually reassured Christian authors themselves

Evidence

Peter the Venerable insisted that the Latins —- that is, the Cluniacs and their employees - could not be mistaken about the Qur’an because of the excellence of their translators.* It would have been absurd to tell Muslims this, although ostensibly they were being addressed. Peter can only have been reassuring himself, and it is a sign of greatness in him that he ever realised that Muslims would make objections at all. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1418

Categorization

• XREF: Fits the vault’s pattern of how ‘the Muslim’ functions as rhetorical interlocutor rather than real reader — parallels Razack/Aziz accounts of constructed audiences.