Travelers recycled mediaeval anti-Islamic tradition despite direct observation.

Evidence

Travellers always seem to show independent judgement most when they are speaking of actual encounters, and least when they discuss theory, dogma, or the life of Muhammad. They easily confused what they saw, what they were told, and what they had long ago read in books.® So it continued. Most travellers of the seventeenth century added practical observations of their own, but based their accounts of Islam as a religion, not on their own direct experience, but on tradition inherited from the mediaeval West. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1568

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the vault’s Razack/Aziz claim that ‘Islam’ as a constructed category reproduces inherited Western tropes rather than empirical knowledge — this is a premodern mechanism of the same cultural reproduction.
• QUESTION: Daniel frames first-hand encounter vs. inherited dogma as an epistemic split — does this map onto Said’s distinction between latent and manifest Orientalism?