Thirteenth-century Christian missionaries predicted Islam’s imminent demise using fabricated Muslim sources.

Evidence

Bacon, like the anonymous author of De statu Sarracenorum, thought the Saracens could be brought to the Christian truth through preaching- though Bacon underpinned his missionary strategy with supposedly foolproof philosophical argumentation (explicitly rejected in De statu). Both authors provide comforting predictions of the imminent demise of Islam, supposedly gleaned from the works of Muslim writers. While the author of De statu claims to have found these prophecies in the Saracens’ holy books, Bacon prefers to ground his in the “hard science” of astrology: And they [the Saracens] speak beautifully and with certitude about the destruction of the law of Muhammad. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1158

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the vault’s existing claim that Orientalist tropes about Islam’s inherent decline/corruption predate modernity — this is a 13th-century root of the ‘Islam is dying’ trope Aziz/Razack critique in modern form.
• QUESTION: Worth checking whether Tolan traces how these ‘predictions in Muslim writers’ circulated and survived into Enlightenment-era claims of Islam’s inevitable collapse.
• SEED: Angle: the medieval Christian habit of fabricating/appropriating Muslim prophecies of Islam’s demise as a prototype of modern ‘end of Islam’ forecasts built on partisan sources.