Wycliffe saw Islam as a mirror of Western Church corruption

Evidence

Wycliffe, however, went much further. For him the main characteristics of Islam were also the main characteristics of the Western Church of his own day. This does not mean that he was favorably disposed toward Islam. On the contrary. The leading characteristics of both Islam and the Western Church, as he saw them, were pride, cupidity, the desire for power, the lust for possession, the gospel of violence, and the preference for human ingenuity to the word of God. These features in the West were the main cause both of the divisions within Christendom and of the division of the West from its neighbors—the division of Avignon from Rome, of Greek from Latin, of Western Christendom from the Nestorians and from the other Christian communities of Asia and India, and finally of Islam from Christianity. — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 447

These vices in the Church were, in a mysterious way, the cause of the rise of Islam, which only began with the growth of pride and avarice and the possessions of the Church. And just as worldliness in the Church produced the religion of worldliness in Islam, so Islam would wither away with the reversal of this tendency within the Church, and in no other way. “I am bold to say,” Wycliffe wrote on the vigil of the Annunciation, 1378, “that this antireligion will grow until the clergy returns to the poverty of Jesus Christ, and to its original state. For opposites, as Aristotle says in the fourth book of his Meteorology, are dissolved by their opposites, and the hill of the Lord is built by persecution and patience.” — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 450

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘enemy as mirror of self’ motif reappears in modern critique-of-Western-discourse literature (Said) and in the reader’s own framing of imputed-motive discourse.
• DEFINE: Wycliffe coins ‘antireligion’ for Islam — a revealing term that defines Islam purely negatively as the inversion of true religion.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 447; R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 450

Related

• Early Islam scholarship was a weapon in intra-Christian polemics. (similarity 0.79)