The Risalah’s influence came from combining authenticity with polemical value

Evidence

The very great influence of the Risalah, in one form or another, is likely to have sprung, as San Pedro himself suggested, from its combination of authenticity with polemic utility. The authenticity of what derived from a Muslim country was generally recognised.’ The Risalah material, however, had already been selected to illustrate its author’s arguments and insinuations about Muhammad; it had not been assembled academically. This explains both its appeal to mediaeval Europeans, and their general misunderstanding of the context to which the data referred to belong. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1290

Categorization

• SEED: A usable angle: how polemically-motivated source selection in medieval scholarship functioned — texts chosen for argumentative utility while borrowing the credibility of their documentary origin, anticipating modern concerns about motivated citation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a text’s historical influence derives from its blend of seeming veracity and argumentative usefulness — that persuasion, not accuracy, drives intellectual transmission — is a genuinely paradigm-level observation about how knowledge propagates.