For Enlightenment philosophers, there is evidence of what Benedict Robinson has called a "crisis of representation," the struggle between humanism and the imagination evident in the treatment of Muhammad and Islam in general, which wavers between a measured rationalism and polemical superstition. Leibniz was one of several philosophers who faced this crisis in his writings: Was Muhammad an enlightened thinker, a medieval humanist, or a force of destruction and evil?

DEFINE: Explains Robinson's 'crisis of representation' — the tension between humanist reason and polemical imagination in how Enlightenment thinkers portrayed Muhammad.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 360