Seventeenth-century scholars still circulated fables about Islam for polemical purposes.

Evidence

Pocock, despite his enormous respect for the latter’s Occidental learning, taxed him with having referred to the supposed dove who spoke to Muhammad, although he had found it in no Islamic source. Grotius did not remove the offending phrase in the next edition (the interview took place in the winter of 1640-41 and the third edition of de veritate was in 1650). — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 2455

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• QUESTION: Grotius kept the dove fable despite Pocock showing it appears in no Islamic source — how long did such invented detail persist in European orientalist literature?

Related

• Early Western scholars preserved fabricated Islamic legends despite correction (similarity 0.87)
• Seventeenth-century European scholars still presented Islam as a Christian heresy built on medieval legends (similarity 0.84)
• Informed medieval polemicists still clung to untenable anti-Muslim fables (similarity 0.83)
• Reland’s 1705 work permanently excluded fable from accepted scholarship on Islam. (similarity 0.79)
• Anti-Islamic polemic survived nearly unchanged into the imperialist nineteenth century. (similarity 0.79)
• Vituperative anti-Islamic polemic persisted into the 1780s and 1790s. (similarity 0.79)
• Scholars perpetuated apocryphal Islamic legends despite knowing they lacked sources (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval polemicists used Muslim sources to validate anti-Muslim legends (similarity 0.78)
• Christian anti-Islamic polemic stayed medieval in method until the 1700s. (similarity 0.78)
• Medieval polemicists quoted the Qur’an inaccurately without scruple (similarity 0.78)
• Medieval polemicists quietly dropped claims lacking cross-tradition confirmation (similarity 0.78)
• Hostile Christian descriptions of Islam repeated themselves virtually unchanged across centuries (similarity 0.78)