The imagined debate genre survived because authors believed their arguments would persuade

Evidence

The fiction of debate was retained because the writers were sincere and really believed that their arguments would have been effective, could they have been used; and they therefore felt justified in setting them against an imaginary back- ground of disputation, which had its own very important function: it would convince the Christian public that these arguments would be effective over Muslims. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1469

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘fiction of debate’ as a genre sustained by sincere self-deception parallels the vault’s point that modern Islam discourse preserves forms even when their ostensible object is absent.