Christian humiliation before Muslim power was attributed to sin, not to God’s will

Evidence

The real interest of Christians was in their consciousness that the Providential dispensation accorded extremely ill with their own strong wish that worldly success should set a seal on religious truth. It was natural that they should bitterly resent that their failure should be attributed to their sins by anyone but the rightful occupant of a Christian pulpit. Ricoldo, usually so derivative, here thought originally; he spoke articulately for the unexpressed disappointment of many who were extremely reluctant to accept a situation in which Christians were powerless. Material success became too easily the criterion of divine justification, even for people whose religion is founded on the blood of martyrs. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 747

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault cluster on how religious identity gets constructed against a religious ‘other’ — here the discomfort of worldly reversal parallels later racialized constructions of the Muslim as constitutive outside, as in Razack’s and Anidjar’s work.
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that even martyrdom-based religion quietly adopts material success as the criterion of divine favor is a layered, lasting point about how religious communities metabolize subordination.