Political conquest enabled sharper Christian polemic against Islam

Evidence

Of these five texts, four, written in Arabic, continue the traditional apologetical strategies of dhimmi Christians, strategies examined in chapters 3 and 4. Yet there seems to be a resurgence in these texts, which now have a sharper, polemical edge, sparked perhaps by the Christian conquest of Toledo and the Almoravid response. A free, aggressive tone is possible in Christian Toledo—without the disastrous personal consequences that it would have entailed in Umayyad Córdoba. Moreover, it is these texts, and texts like them (in particular the Risâlat al-Kindî) that Latin Christians will consult when they wish to learn about (and refute) Islam. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 830

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the vault’s claims about anti-Islamic trope origins: the sharper polemical edge appears only where Christian political power altered the risk of composing it — conquest, not conversion, licensed the rhetoric. — connects to: Napoleon co-opted Islam to win over Egyptians rather than demonizing it — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 157
• QUESTION: Speculative ‘perhaps’ on the Almoravid response — worth checking whether this causal claim is asserted or merely conjectured by Tolan.