The Image of Islam in Early Christendom

ISLAM IN WESTERN LITERATURE invitation provided an opportunity for the Christian Arab al-Kindi to defend Christianity and criticize Islam. Contrary to expectations, al-Kindi directed his focus on the vulnerabilities of Islam, portraying Muhammad as a morally indulgent murderer. He depicted the Koran as a compilation of fabricated revelations and characterized Islam as a religion spread through deceit, violence, and enticing immoral practices. This perspective can be found in Reading No. 15. Similar to St. John, al-Kindi was an Oriental Christian, belonging to a subjugated community living under specific disadvantages. Both of their works, after being translated, exerted significant and long-lasting influence throughout the Western world. It was only natural that the Muslim conquest and occupation of the Iberian Peninsula would fuel an enduring sense of bitterness and hostility among Spanish Christian authors, particularly those of a clerical background. A church deacon and translator of the Koran named Mark of Toledo, who thrived in the late twelfth century, expressed a typical sentiment: the place where “many priests had once offered divine worship to God” was now tainted by the devotion of wicked individuals to the detestable Muhammad, and churches that were once consecrated by the hands of bishops were now desecrated places of worship. The intellectual atmosphere at that time was so strongly antiMuhammadan that even stories could be readily accepted and perpetuated, no matter how fantastical or lacking in factual basis. For instance, Eulogius, a bishop of Cordova