Reland’s 1705 work finally severed scholarly Islam from legend and polemic

Evidence

Reland’s de religione mohammedica (1705) is certainly the most important of several that helped to clear away legend and substitute fact, and only fact; it can be studied with profit to-day. Nonsense that had deceived the learned and indulged the ignorant for so long was not now just pushed temporarily aside by a few authors, but finally excluded from the canon acceptable to scholars. Prideaux’s book (1697) was perhaps the last exception; between his and Reland’s there is as great a chasm as there can be between contemporaries. ‘If ever any Religion was perverted by Adversarys’, said Reland, ‘it was this Religion’; it was the custom to send a young man ‘fir’d with a generous Ardor of understanding the Mahometan Religion’ to study the old authorities, including Ketton, instead of advising him ‘to learn the Arabick, to hear Mahomet speak in his own tongue’. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1658

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the vault’s claim that ‘Islam’ as a scholarly object has a constructed, interest-laden genealogy — parallels Aziz/Razack on the fabrication of a knowable ‘enemy religion.’
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly did Prideaux’s 1697 book contain that makes it the ‘last exception’ — the last Western account to transmit adversary-perverted legend?