Renan’s Averroes study distorted sources to tell a Western rationalism fable

Evidence

His book is less a serious study of Islamic philosophy and more a fable about the rise of rationalism in the West. Arabists who later worked on Averroes found Renan’s view that the Muslim philosopher was a secret atheist to be unfounded. Goldziher was swift to point out that Renan had failed to use two absolutely essential sources: al-Ghazali’s pietistic attack on the philosophy of Avicenna and Averroes’s response to al-Ghazali. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 295

Categorization

• XREF: Pre-figures current debates about Western histories of Islamic philosophy that recast thinkers as proto-atheists or crypto-rationalists.
• SEED: An essay angle: how interpretive frameworks silently shape which sources a scholar deems ‘essential’ and which it neglects.

Related

• Renan equated Islam with an unchanging essence of irrationality intrinsic to the Arab race. (similarity 0.79)