Teleological readings distort medieval anti-Muslim writing

Evidence

Yet we risk seriously misunderstanding the medieval actors in these events if we see every piece of anti-Jewish legislation or every act of violence against a Jew as a sort of precursor to the Holocaust. Whatever one thinks of the French and British conquests of large parts of the Muslim world, they are not merely the reenactment of the timeless Western greed embodied in the Crusades, as some have claimed. To catalog the anti-Muslim sentiments from the writings of medieval Latin authors and expose them to the disapproving gaze of the presumably enlightened Anglophone reader of the twentieth century, as Norman Daniel has done, is little help in understanding what drove those authors to write what they wrote. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1370

Categorization

• XREF: This directly cautions against the strongest forms of the vault’s genealogical claims — the modern Islam-West opposition descends from these sources but is not a simple reenactment of timeless greed.
• ADDENDUM: Method of reading medieval texts on their own terms (contexts, not a timeline to orientalism/colonialism) is directly relevant to how the existing Anidjar/Aziz vault claims should be handled.