Prejudiced Christian polemic against Islam persisted into the late seventeenth century

Evidence

It is astonishing how late the prejudiced approach survived. Pére Nau and many others were less prejudiced and fairer than, several generations later, Prideaux, the Dean of Norwich who acknowledged his debt to Ricoldo when he set out deliberately to establish the Prophet’s zmposture. His is the classic example of all that was least generous in the Christian attitude, and he was entirely indebted to the polemic lines of the mediaeval writers, though in balance of judgement inferior to the best of them. It may be that his real purpose was to defend revealed religion from the attacks of the Deists; but this cannot, by modern standards, excuse the use of false material. In particular, it is remarkable that he retained the Sergzus material. Nau had attempted, as San Pedro Pascual had done, to reconcile Christian Sergius with Arabic Bahira; Prideaux was still taunting Islam with Sergius in the very last years of the seventeenth century; he died in 1724. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1598

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s genealogy of how ‘Islam’ is constituted as the West’s polemical outside — this documents a late-17th-century survival of medieval anti-Islamic polemic (Sergius/Bahira legend) in Christian apologetics.