Crusade-era writers invented Saracen idolatry to justify their own violence

Evidence

Europe North of the Pyrenees showed little interest in Islam before the first Crusade of 1095–99. Chapter 5 examines how chroniclers of the first crusade portrayed Saracens as idolaters who had polluted the holy city of Jerusalem with their profane rites, in particular through the adoration of a silver idol of Muhammad in the Temple of Solomon, an idol the crusaders supposedly demolished. This image, albeit wildly inaccurate, helps justify and glorify, for these authors, the violence of the Crusade. Other authors throughout the Middle Ages, particularly the poets of Chansons de Geste, offer a similar image of Saracen idolatry, often with similar motives. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 423

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the genealogical claim that Islamophobia’s tropes were weaponized to license violence — connected to the vault’s Anidjar/Aziz claims about how the Islam-West opposition justifies aggression. — connects to: Lynch mobs justify murder by merging contemporary Muslims with mythic demons — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1204