The conviction of holding universal opinion is what made medieval Christians provincial

Evidence

The feeling of Latin Christians was so strongly that they were supported by the weight of world opinion and history. They believed that what they rejected was peculiar and alien to all nations, to the pagan philosophers and to the Holy Scriptures; obviously offensive to good taste and to reason. It is exactly in their conviction that they shared a universal opinion that they seem most provincial. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 444

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense inversion — universality claims mark the very parochialism they disavow — that bears directly on the reader’s thread about how ‘the West’ naturalizes itself as the universal standpoint against a particularized Islam.
• XREF: Echoes Razack’s and Said’s point that claims to universality/objectivity are the signature of a hegemonic particular — same move the vault documents in racialized constructions of Islam.
• SHARE: This exact formulation would land with whoever in the reader’s circle works on orientalism and the rhetoric of universality.