The trickster Muhammad image blended learned and folk elements

Evidence

Yet other texts began to circulate in Latin in the twelfth century that cannot easily be classified as either “learned” or “popular,” either “clerical” or “lay.” This is particularly true of four polemical lives of Muhammad in which the prophet of Islam is painted not only as a heresiarch but also as a trickster and magician: Embrico of Mainz’s Vita Mahumeti, Gautier de Compiègne’s De otia Machometi, Adelphus’s Vita Machometi, and the brief biography that Guibert of Nogent inserts into his Gesta. In these four texts, a real (if limited) “learned” knowledge of Islam and of Muhammad’s life is inextricably mixed with imaginary “popular” images of the trickster of folklore. This newfound fascination with a largely imaginary trickster Muhammad reflects not only a growing concern with Islam but also growing uncertainties as to how to distinguish “real” reform from heresy in the turbulent spiritual atmosphere of the twelfth century. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 739

Categorization

• XREF: Origins of the fraudster-impostor Muhammad trope that survived into modern polemic; connects to vaulted analyses of Orientalist deception narratives.
• QUESTION: How precisely did the trickster-magician Muhammad become the ‘impostor’ of nineteenth-century Orientalist biography?