Christian polemicists obsessed over Islamic legal rules while knowing nothing of Muslim practice.

Evidence

If we review the Western approach to Islam over the whole field of morals, we shall be struck by the theoretical, and almost legalistic, character that it assumes. This draws attention to the inexactitude of the theoretical information so obstinately stated. In their assertions about Islamic jurisprudence, Christian writers were perhaps as often wrong as right, yet it was characteristic that they insisted on specifying minutely, for example, the numbers of wives and concubines permitted, and the regulations that governed marriage, divorce and remarriage. Of Muslim practice there can have been practically no information available. Thus it was the number of wives allowed that was the focus of interest, rather than the number Muslims mostly had; it was generally implied, rather naively, that they would always enjoy in practice as many as they could by law. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 890

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my Complaints About Immodesty article on how moral panics run on classed, symbolic anxiety rather than observed practice. — connects to: Medieval Christian polemicists fixated on Islam’s legal theory while knowing nothing of its practice; Christian polemicists never consulted Muslims about actual Muslim beliefs — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1439
• SEED: Angle for an essay: why polemicists fixate on what a religion legally permits (e.g. numbers of wives) rather than what its adherents actually do.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense point about the epistemic structure of polemic — theory substituting for observation because the real object of attack is symbolic.