The Reformation polemic against Islam reproduced twelfth-century medieval texts

Evidence

The Basel municipal council judged that it was dangerous to publish the “fables and heresies” of the Koran. Help came to the embattled humanists in the form of a letter to the council from none other than Martin Luther himself, who declared his support for the project, saying that there was no better way to injure Muhammad and the Turks than to publish their “lies and fables” for all to see. Earlier the same year Luther himself had completed his German translation of Riccoldo’s Contra legem Sarracenorum. When Martin Luther and his contemporaries sought to comprehend Islam and to engage in polemics against it, they turned naturally to translations and texts produced between the twelfth and the early fourteenth centuries. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1355

Categorization

• CANDY: The irony that publishing the Koran was treated as a crime in 1542 Basel, with Luther as the free-speech defender, is a great litmus-test conversation fact.
• XREF: Directly evidences the medieval-origins genealogy: Luther’s ‘lies and fables / injure Muhammad’ framing exactly matches the medieval polemical template the reader is tracing back from modern Islamophobia.