Christians were scandalized by religious justification of acts, not the acts themselves

Evidence

Muhammad, always moved by religious considerations, shocked Christians for this very reason, which made him always appear hypocritical. It was less that wrong practices gave scandal, than that their justification by religion did so. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 571

Categorization

• XREF: This mechanism — the offensive thing is religious legitimation of conduct, not the conduct — parallels the vault’s theme of how Islam as religion-as-politics gets constructed, where Muslim religious self-understanding itself becomes the accusation.