Savary humanized Muhammad yet kept the medieval portrait’s facts

Evidence

Savary presents a similar picture. We have already noted his tendency to ‘humanise’ in the translation of the Qur’an. The same may be said of the Life of Muhammad which he took from Arabic authors to precede his translation; the story of Zayd and Zaynab, for example, is there told with all imaginable romantic trappings: the beauty of Zaynab’s form, the politic complaisance of Zayd. Once again we read that Muhammad chose a basic tenet, simple and easy to grasp, the unity of God; pronounced his own prophethood, in order to guarantee the truth of the revelation; and then ‘took from the ethics of Christianity and Judaism what seemed to him most suitable to peoples of warm climates’. For Savary Muhammad was a wise man and a subtle politician adapting doctrine as he went along. There is once more continuity with mediaevals who would have dissented only from Savary’s approval of what he and they agreed to be the facts. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1631

Categorization

• XREF: Says Muhammad borrowed selectively from ‘warm climates’ ethics—an environmental-racial determinism reading of Islam that fits the vault’s construction-of-Islam-as-other claims.