` I apologize, I missed your reply. I think the passage relevant and should be included, possibly as a quote, but needs to be shortened greatly, and quoted to focus on Muhammad (the subject of this article) rather than the Orient. The point seems to be that western authors, writing for a European audience, would portray Muhammad as alien, as a literary technique to provide a contrast with the familiar. Perhaps Said could be quoted like this: ``[In Dante's Inferno] Islam and its designated representatives are creatures of Western geographical, historical, and above all, moral apprehension. ... Mohammed ... [is] fixed in a visionary cosmology — fixed, laid out, boxed in, imprisoned, without much regard for anything except their ``function`` and the patterns they realize on the stage on which they appear. What ... Dante tried to do in the Inferno, is ... to characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe. Hence the vacillation between the familiar and the alien; Mohammed is always the imposter (familiar, because he pretends to be like the Jesus we know) and always the Oriental (alien, because although he is in some ways ``like`` Jesus, he is after all not like him).``  I hope that captures the correct emphasis. I would need to be distilled further for this article due to its length and undue weight concerns, although the article Medieval Christian views on Muhammad might benefit from a longer version. ~    `