Polemicist fathers were culturally eclipsed by their more irenic, Arabized sons

Evidence

Alvarus fulminated against Christian youths who preferred Arabic poetry to Latin letters; his own son, it seems, composed Arabic poems. Hafs ibn Albar, according to one of his Muslim contemporaries, was the most intelligent and most Arabized of the Andalusian Christians. Hafs translated the Psalms from Latin into Arabic verse. He also composed the Book of Fifty-Seven Questions, an Arabic apology of Christianity that (although it is now lost) seems to have been much less virulent than his father’s. Rather than vilifying Islam, as his father had, he crafted apologetical works that aimed to defend and justify Christianity in the eyes of both Christians and Muslims. Mozarab Christians had found the spirit of polite apologetical dialogue familiar to oriental Christians. The father’s diatribes were soon forgotten: Alvarus’s Indiculus luminosus and Life of Eulogius each survive in one tenth-century manuscript; of Eulogius’s none remain. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 551

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the graft/roots article’s theme of inheritance and what survives — the surviving manuscripts are the moderate son’s, not the polemicist father’s; polemic is ephemeral writeable but irenic voices endured.
• XREF: Feeds the reader’s claim that the Islam-West opposition trope was a minority, contested position even at its supposed origin — the anti-Islam firebrands were outnumbered and outlasted by dialogue.
• DEEPTHINKING: A generational inversion: the son who betrays his father’s cause by collaborating becomes the figure who survives while the father’s works are lost — invites sustained reflection on which losers history actually preserves.