Writings Against the Saracens (Fathers of the Church Medieval Continuations)

Good book. Islam is an evil religion. As a Traditional Catholic, the Traditional Vatican of 1900 years saw Islam so much different than the Universalistic Vatican of today. We are living in a dark age. We need more Crusaders.

It took a long time for Western Christians to recognise Islam as a theological threat and even longer for them to respond to Islam in an informed manner. Prior to Peter the Venerable there had been some anti-Islamic works written in Spain and Peter Alfonsi (died early 12 century) had written about Islam in his 'Dialogues Against the Jews' but this was very much ground breaking work.Firstly, Peter the Venerable wanted to be accurately informed. He enlisted the help of a number of Arabic-speaking Christians and commissioned them to translated the Quran and a corpus of hadiths into Latin. He also translated the Apology of al-Kindy (whoever he was) into Latin. With this information Peter the Venerable wrote 'Summary of the Entire Heresy of the Saracens' and 'Against the Sect of the Saracens'.There are few wild accusations in the works of Peter. There is no calling the Arabs 'pagans' like in many crusader texts and there is no accusation of idololatry but there is the claim that Muhammad was diabolically inspired. Peter even had a Muslim on his team to ensure accuracy.Peter's polemics are a snapshot of 12th century scholarship.Some of the things Peter finds objectionable are denial of the trinity (summary 1), denial of the crucifixion (summary 2) and the virgins in paradise (summary 9) in the Summary, which is a short overview of Islam (16 pages in length).The 'Against the Saracens' is a much lengthier work covering 108 pages of the translation. Peter insists of seeing Islam in the tradition of Christian heresies so he mentions pervious heretics like Sabellians and Arians often. I thought Peter's discussion of the reliability of the scriptures (Contra Saracenorum sections 75-88) and his refusal to acknowledge that Christianity has been superseded by Islam to be the most interesting part of the polemic.Don't be misled. Peter the Venerable was not interested in a nice inter religious dialogue. He wanted to refute Islam but he wanted to do it accurately. But this left me wondering as to who exactly was going to read his work. I can't imagine there were too many Latin reading Muslims in the 12th century.Since the 'clash of civilisations' talk is big at the moment this work is topical, informative and interesting.