Western polemicists explained Muhammad’s prophethood as motivated by social ambition rooted in his marriage

Evidence

Because his claim was presumed to be fraudulent, it was thought necessary to explain why he should ever have wanted to be a prophet. Thus Vitry said that when he was ‘suddenly made great’ by his marriage, he ‘began to be exalted’ and planned ‘by every means how he could obtain the lordship’. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 523

Categorization

• XREF: This psychologist-of-the-Prophet move — explaining away religious claim by allegedly worldly motive — parallels the vault’s theme of how a religious Other gets read as inauthentic, a pre-modern version of the ‘fraudulent Muslim’ trope.