The West’s polemical image of Islam was self-serving rather than descriptive

Evidence

At the same time, rejection did not cause the thing rejected to cease to exist: Islam was still at the frontier. For this reason it had to be admitted openly as an enemy, and presented in terms that did not make it necessary to change or adapt any single facet of Christian and European culture. This is why the data of an inherited polemic were preferred to the fruits of personal observation; and why men living in Syria chose or consented to believe fantastic nonsense about Islamic matters. This is why the Latin West formed a more or less invariable canon of beliefs about Islam; it decided for itself what Islam was, and formed a view materially different from anything Muslims would recognise. There was nothing original about the view thus formed. Every main idea probably existed among Christians subject to Islamic rule, and many also among the Greeks, from the earliest generations of Islam. The important thing was that it suited the West. It corresponded to need; it made it possible to protect the minds of Christians against apostasy and it gave Christendom self-respect in dealing with a civilisation in many ways its superior. So much did this canon suit the need that it survived many changes in the relative positions of Islam and Christendom and in the interior movements of Christian opinion. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1508

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallel to Aziz’s argument in ‘The Racial Muslim’ and Anidjar’s Jew-Arab genealogy that ‘Islam’ is constructed for Western internal needs, not from observation of Muslims. — connects to: Western commentators frame Muslim leaders as irrational while granting Israelis and Americans rationality — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 331
• ADDENDUM: Corroborates the vault’s core claim that Islam functions as the West’s constitutive outside, constructed to require no self-adaptation — an earlier medieval genealogy of Razack’s ‘casting out’ thesis.