Alfonso justified punishing blasphemy by citing harsher Muslim blasphemy penalties

Evidence

If the Moors, in all the places where they have power over the Christians, prohibit them from insulting Muhammad and from saying anything against his doctrine, and for this offense they beat them and hurt them in many ways and decapitate them, how much more appropriate it is that we prohibit them (and others who do not believe in our faith) from daring to criticize or insult our faith. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 987

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: An ‘blasphemy was a reciprocal legal construction’ angle: each faith citing the other’s severity to justify its own — a symmetry argument used to authorize execution.
• QUESTION: Was this reciprocal-blasphemy argument common across medieval Mediterranean legal texts, or distinctive to Alfonso?

Related

• Alfonso justified Christian blasphemy law by citing Muslim dhimmi precedent (similarity 0.89)
• Castilian law criminalized physical insults to holy objects as blasphemy by non-Christians (similarity 0.80)