R. W. Southern — Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages

58 published claims from this book.

• A late-thirteenth-century traveler vastly overstated Christian numbers in the East
• A Mongol-Christian military alliance against Islam was genuinely planned and nearly happened
• An introspective self-critical turn marked a new era in Christian thought about Islam
• Bacon abandoned biblical prophecy to read Islam through philosophy
• Bacon saw Christianity as intellectually indebted to its infidel enemies
• Broadening salvation’s scope weakened Western civilizational unity
• By 1250 the unity-of-God doctrine was common Christian knowledge about Islam
• By 1453 Europe had no Christian Arabic scholars despite a century of outreach
• Christians and Muslims could ally against pagans over shared monotheism.
• Conquest cannot convert peoples; preaching requires language skill and doctrinal study
• Cultural coexistence corroded Christian identity until forced martyrdom protests
• Detached inquiry about Islam requires confidence of superiority
• Eastern Christian sects retained full hierarchical churches larger than the Western Church
• Effective world-level disputation required languages, not just dialectic
• Epic poetry assigned Muslims over thirty invented gods
• Even irenic interfaith dialogue served Christian apologetic strategy
• Every seminal medieval idea about Islam originated in Spain
• Failed medieval scholarship still developed transferable habits of mind.
• Fantasizing about Islam historically preceded and enabled accurate observation of it
• Fifteenth-century prelates feared merchants returning from Islam with criticisms of Christian faith
• Ideological study of Islam is fundamentally alike across Marxist and medieval Christian frames
• Initial intellectual breakthroughs come easily but sustained inquiry meets resistance
• Internal Christian divisions were blamed for driving would-be converts away from the faith
• Islam menaced Europe more in 1600 yet mattered less intellectually than in 1000
• Islam posed the most far-reaching problem medieval Christendom faced
• Islam’s intellectual peak came within four centuries, far faster than the medieval West’s
• Islam’s selective agreement with Christianity defied medieval categorization
• Islam’s worldly success made it uniquely impervious to church refutation
• Islamic philosophy shaped even orthodox medieval Christian theology
• Koranic law protected Christians on condition of tribute and humbling
• Late medieval thinkers grew newly anxious to include unbelievers in salvation
• Long philosophical tradition gave Western monotheists an edge in the first world debate
• Luther located the final Antichrist inside the Church, not in Islam.
• Medieval Christians invented a distorted Muslim Trinity as mirror of their own faith
• Medieval Islam and Christendom were structurally opposite societies
• Medieval scholars identified the Saracens as Ishmael’s literal descendants
• Medieval thinkers blamed Christians’ own divisions and vices for Islam’s refusal to convert
• Medieval Western fantasies about the Mongols proved astonishingly accurate
• Medieval Western legend recast Mahomet as a disappointed would-be cardinal
• Mid-fifteenth-century European thought on Islam surpassed all earlier and later centuries
• Mongol contact revealed Christian-Islamic agreement and unknown eastern Christians
• Peter the Venerable conceived of Islam as the last unanswered Christian heresy
• Pius II’s letter to Mahomet II was rhetorically brilliant but insincere
• Popular images of Mahomet hardened into fixed fictional characters
• Reason’s defense of law rests on its open discussability, not its content
• Roger Bacon was overshadowed by later myth-making about him
• Shared monotheism made Christians and Moslems natural allies against Buddhists
• Spanish thought about Islam was mostly rational, not fanatical
• The 1143 Latin Koran translation ended rather than began serious Islamic study
• The Islamic philosophical influx radically transformed Western learning after 1230
• The mid-fifteenth-century writers treated Islam as an urgent practical problem, not a cosmic role
• The Mongols’ appearance transformed the Western world picture of Islam
• The most charitable medieval Christian appeal to Islam was deadlocked by Latin
• Twelfth-century Western images of Islam were born amidst triumphal storytelling
• Undecipherable lead tablets fueled hopes of a unifying final religion
• Wycliffe denied that salvation was confined to Church members
• Wycliffe likened papal authority to Mahomet’s ban on questioning
• Wycliffe saw Islam as a mirror of Western Church corruption