Christians read Muslim lawfulness as scandalous criminality

Evidence

All accounts related to the Risalah stressed two points particularly. The offer of the fifth part of the booty as the Prophet’s share interested Western readers, for example, over the conquest of the Banti Qurayzah: “he brought back to Muhammad a fifth part of all the spoils, saying, “Such a part is owed to thee, Prophet of God.” ’ There was a shocked but gratified sense of how scandalous this was; what Muslims saw as following the law, Christians took for granted was contrary to it. … Pejorative phrases were used to describe the Medinan period as criminal; thus Vitry said of it that Muhammad ‘had his neighbours, of whom he was envious, secretly and treacherously slaughtered …” — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 537

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates the vault’s existing theme that ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — here the same Quranic practice is one group’s sharia, another’s proof of criminality. Connects to Anidjar’s genealogy of the ‘Semite’/‘Islam’ as foil. — connects to: Anti-sharia testimony framed lawful Muslim practice as a seditious, lawless threat
• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the pattern from the anti-Islamophobia thread that the same act read inside a tradition as lawful is read from outside as transgression — echoing how Razack/Aziz show Muslims’ lawful practices reframed as threat.