Medieval anti-Muslim polemic mocked the mi’raj night-journey by contrasting it with a degrading corpse

Evidence

San Pedro recounted the tale, and then apostrophised the Prophet: “As to what thou didst say, that as thou hadst ascended living to Heaven’ — this refers to the ‘night-journey’, the miraculous mi’raj — ‘so also the angels would descend and carry thy body to Heaven: I say to thee, O Muhammad, that, as thou didst ascend living to Heaven, so did the angels carry th¥ body to Heaven’ — that is, not at all. In the different versions of this supposed last prophetic error, the purpose of all of which was to cast the greatest possible discredit and unpleasantness on the memory of the Prophet, the consequence was that the body stank and had to be buried hurriedly. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 608

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s Anidjar/Aziz thread on how Islam’s constitutive elements (here its miracle tradition) get re-read as villainy.