Christian and Jewish accusations of Muslim idolatry were constructed propaganda, not observation.

Evidence

Grégoire’s theory is that the allegation of polytheism was deliberately invented as part of Crusade propaganda and out of odzum theologicum, and also that the Jewish and other material out of which it was formed associated it with Solomon’s whoring after strange gods. Muhammad, he thinks, in the forms Mahom and Malcometto, may even have been associated with Moloch. With this Grégoire connects the story of the idol in the Qubbat as- Sakhrah, since the Templum Det was supposed to be Solomon’s Temple. This is not the place to discuss Grégoire’s theories about the derivation of the names of the idols, Tervagan in particular, that adorn the chansons. He does, however, seem to me to have established that there is a probable connection between the Christian and Jewish suspicions of the Ka’bah, and also of the Qubbat as-Sakhrah. It is also relevant to remember that the abjuration formula for converts from Islam which is thought to have its origin in the first years after the rise of Islam required the actual abjuration of the Ka’bah because of a carved stone of Aphrodite worshipped there; and St John of Damascus relates that there was such a stone, without asserting that Muhammad did not have it destroyed; the natural way to understand his text would be that pagan worship had ended. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1768

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the vault’s Anidjar/Aziz/Razack thread on how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside—here, the fabrication charge itself becomes an evidence-producing mechanism, linking theology-of-the-other to imperial legitimation.
• DEFINE: Clarifies crypto-polytheism in the medieval anti-Islamic canon: the accusation that Muslims secretly worship Aphrodite-idols at the Ka’bah.
• QUESTION: The abjuration formula requiring converts to renounce the Ka’bah as an Aphrodite site deserves deep digging—is the pagan-cult charge older than, or parallel to, the Crusade-era fabrication?