Christians projected their own relic practices onto imagined Saracen idolatry.

Evidence

If the image of idolatry comes in part from the reading of the ancients, perhaps it also stems from a projection of Christian practice onto the imagined enemy. After all, images and relics played an important role in medieval Christianity; Saints were often invoked to succor their devotees and to smite the enemy. When the saints failed to do so, their relics were often punished, “humiliated”; it was perhaps natural for Christians to assume that the Saracens practiced similar rites. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 705

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The accuser’s own veneration-and-punishment of images becomes the template for the enemy’s imagined idolatry — a psychodynamic account of projection as the engine of the entire Saracen-pagan trope. This is the genealogy the reader’s whole chapter pursue aims at.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the vault’s treatment of how the ‘other’ is constituted by projection of the self’s own displaced practices — echoes the Razack claim about saving-imperialism mapping the colonizer’s own sins onto natives.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how every era’s ‘idolatrous enemy’ is constructed by projecting the accuser’s own most intimate devotional or economic practices onto strangers — from medieval relics to modern accusations of barbarism leveled at cultures that mirror us.