Latin Christendom’s first portraits of Islam reused the template of pagan idolatry.

Evidence

Over and against these meager references in a handful of manuscripts in a few libraries scattered across Europe, the reader in the year 1000 would have a wealth of information readily available in the many manuscripts of the Bible, Jerome, Isidore, and Bede; there, of course, he would learn that the Saracens were pagan idolaters and stone-worshipers. It should thus come as no surprise that when (in the eleventh and twelfth centuries), Latin authors began to take an interest in the religion of the Saracens, they described it (in increasingly lurid detail) in the familiar and despised guise of pagan idolatry. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 586

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the vault’s genealogical claim (Anidjar/Aziz/Razack) that the Western image of the Muslim derives from pre-existing templates of the religious Other — here pagan idolatry, not a fresh encounter with Islam.
• ADDENDUM: This is the root mechanism behind later medieval misreadings of Islam as polytheism/idolatry, relevant to any genealogy of European knowledge-forms about Muslims.