Western medieval Christians knew Islam’s devotional formulas only faintly through rare Arabic translations

Evidence

There was some sense of the religious formulas with which Muslims will speak of God and of holy persons. These penetrated chiefly from literary sources, the rare translations from Arabic. ‘They reject’, said Pedro de Alfonso, ‘whatever is not consecrated in the name of God.’ … The Arabic expressions are recognisable in Mark’s Qur’anic paraphrases, set in the mouth of the Prophet, whom he imagined preaching to his people: ‘Adore the living God who created the Heavens and the Earth, angels and men and all that are in them; do not adore gods who cannot do you good or harm you …’ … Sometimes, too, there was a use of phrases that were Islamic or that struck their Western users as Islamic, and that were self-consciously used to convey an exotic atmosphere; James of Acqui repeatedly referred, in an Islamic context exclusively, to ‘the great God’: gratia Det magni, amicus Dei magni; the weight of invisible inverted commas can be felt. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1141

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s broader theme (from book_so_far) of how medieval Western writers shaped Islam through fragments — echoes the treatment of translation and phraseology in earlier sections.