Crusaders who had entered the Temple never claimed to find Muhammad’s fabricated idol

Evidence

It is to be noted also that, although writers of the time of the First Crusade spoke of the idol in advance, none claimed to have found it when the Christians converted the Temple to their own use. The libel started to circulate again when the ‘Temple’ returned to Muslim use. … We must also bear in mind the stories of idols in the Ka‘bah, and the association of ideas, in a nebulous or confused form, of the Ka‘bah, of pagan worship of ‘Aphrodite’, of the hajj, of the choice of the dies venerea for worship and of the identification of Islam, by reason of its moral laxity, as lex venerea. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1765

Categorization

• QUESTION: Implies the polemic was purely rhetorical and never tested against lived experience — worth tracing whether any first-hand crusader account contradicts the idol claim directly.
• SEED: Essay angle: how a defamatory libel survives among people who have literally been inside the place where the false object supposedly stood — the inertia of polemic against direct evidence.
• XREF: connects to: The Muslim-idol libel revived only after the Temple returned to Muslim hands