Crusade chroniclers invented a silver idol of Mahomet to justify holy war as purification

Evidence

The temple of Solomon has become the center of the cult of the pagan idol of Mahummet; for Raymond d’Aguilers, the “blasphemies” that the Saracens performed in the temple (the Dome of the Rock) called down the righteous vengeance of God in the form of a bloody massacre. But Raymond did not say what these “blasphemies” were; Raoul provides a vivid image of them: a silver idol of the pagan god Mahummet. Tancred, first thinking the statue might be one of Mars or Apollo, finally realizes that it is Mahummet, whom he also calls Antichrist. The destruction of this profane image, intruder in the temple of the Lord, provides a dramatic, vindictive climax to the first Crusade. Other chroniclers recount more or less the same story; for Fulcher of Chartres this idolatrous worship of Mahomet had polluted the temple. Robert the Monk more graphically accuses the Saracens of having defiled the altars and baptismal fonts by smearing them with blood from circumcisions. This notion of “pollution” of the holy places of Jerusalem is a justification and a rallying cry: when Edessa falls to Zanqî, Bernard of Clairvaux and other preachers decry the pollution of the Holy Land by “heathen filth” [spurcitia paganorum] and call for purification through Christian swords. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 662

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the Orientalist/eurocentric genealogy already in the vault via Anidjar/Aziz — the fabrication of Mahomet-as-pagan-idol and ‘pollution’ rhetoric is the medieval root of later tropes of Islam as defiling/backward.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘pollution of the holy places’ justifying violent purification parallels the moral-panic mechanics in the Immodesty and Sacrifice articles — pollution rhetoric legitimizing punitive cleansing.