Underground religious leaders invented doctrines rather than admit ignorance

Evidence

The “articles of faith” that the Young Man preached were taken from the writings of the fifteenth-century imam of Segovia, Isa, and were sound and orthodox enough. I think it would be wrong to place too much stress on the fact that many details in the Young Man’s writings were indeed clumsy embroidery. In the Morisco underground, there must have existed a powerful demand for information about Islam. Whenever the Young Man (or his informants) did not have the wherewithal to respond adequately to that demand, they were under temptation to invent. It will have been hard for them to admit that they just did not know something. And of course a liar, once he has started to lie, is on a slippery slope. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 835

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the moral economy of honest ignorance in expert communities—when does admitting ‘I don’t know’ become impossible, and what fabrications follow?
• XREF: Connects to how any suppressed or diaspora community reconstructs orthodoxy—parallels to early Church apocryphal literature.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 835