Even hostile medieval observers conceded Muslims’ genuine devotional sincerity.

Evidence

The anonymous English traveller said: “Wherever they are on the Earth, at certain hours of the day, with bended knee and prostrated to earth, they adore God devoutly.’ This note of the ubiquity of the prayer in Muslim lands recurs … In Lull’s romance, Blanquerna, the Pope’s Arabic secretary told him that, being a man of ‘heathen’ (i.e. Muslim) birth, he was familiar with the way at their sermons Muslims weep, because they ‘preach of devotion and of considerations upon the glory of Paradise and the pains of Hell …’ One critic would somewhat meanly admit only the semblance of devotion in a dervish who was ‘the most enthusiastic emulator of his ancestral traditions, adorned externally, indeed, and in a wonderful way, with the political virtues, very simple in appearance, very humbly dressed, modest in bearing, chary of speech; yet within he was empty’. This in the context may refer to the individual case; but more probably the vanity of all virtue outside the Church is implied. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1190

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the vault’s constructionist thread: the observed sincerity of Muslim prayer resisted easy demonization, revealing the porosity of the West/Islam boundary rather than clean constitution-through-opposition.