A mistranslation of one Koranic word made Muslims appear to worship a metal idol.

Evidence

And before all, I [the convert] anathematize the God of Muhammad about whom [Muhammad] says “He is God alone, God made of solid, hammer-beaten metal; He begets and is not begotten, nor is there like unto him any one.” … This is, curiously enough, based on a translation of Koran 112; an accurate translation except for one key word, samad, which means “solid”or “eternal” in the Koran but here is rendered “of solid, hammer-beaten metal” (‘ó). Emperor Manuel I Comnenus (1143–80), fully aware of how ridiculous it is to accuse Muslims of worshiping a ‘ó God, ordered the clause struck from the formula of abjuration. From Manuel’s standpoint, it seems, Muslim converts should be asked only to renounce the errors of Muhammad, not the true, eternal God, who was after all the same as the Christian God. Manuel succeeded in having the formula altered, but only in the face of strong resistance by conservative church members offended at the suggestion that the Muslim god was the same as their own. These Byzantine church leaders need to affirm the religious alterity of Islam in order to keep the boundaries clear between religious truth and error: better to associate Islam with pagan idolatry than to suggest that it venerates the eternal God. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 683

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows samad mistranslated as ‘hammer-beaten metal,’ the etymological root of an idolatry charge.
• XREF: Connects to the vault’s Anidjar trope-genealogy claims about Islam as ‘the other’ defined by ritual error
• SEED: Angle: how a single deliberate mistranslation of scripture seeded an eight-century-old polemic that still echoes in ‘Islam worships a stone/idol’ tropes