Seventeenth-century Europe punished study of Islam while permitting pagan classics

Evidence

Although he was savage in his denunciation of Muslim doctrines, the hostility was not founded upon ignorance. He had spent forty years studying what he regarded as a damned text and his annotations drew heavily upon the works of Muslim commentators. Despite his ferociously hostile commentary, the Pope at first forbade him to publish the text. In the seventeenth century it was thought dangerous to study Islam. Yet no such prejudice applied to studying the pagan doctrines and rituals of ancient Greece and Rome. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 185

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme of Islam as a forbidden scholarly object versus permitted Greco-Roman paganism — parallels Orientalist apologetics debates elsewhere in this book and in European intellectual history.
• SHARE: The detail that Pope Innocent XI forbade Marracci’s publication while Greek/Roman paganism faced no such ban is a sharp ironic fact for anyone into the history of censorship.