Medieval anti-Muslim translators deliberately mistranslated texts to make Islam repulsive.

Evidence

Where he has the wholly untendentious statement, ‘when they saw him, they praised him greatly’, Ketton put quo viso, omnes menstruatae sunt. “The old Latin translators have strangely mistaken the sense of the original word’, commented Sale, ’… and then rebuke Mohammad for the indecency, crying out demurely in the margin, O foedum et obscoenum prophetam! .. .’ Although the comment in the margin is actually Bibliander’s, the rebuke is deserved, because it exactly delineates the weakest side of the Cluniac and Latin Christian attitude. … The phrase thus quoted in different forms describes the reaction of the Egyptian ladies to their first glimpse of the beauty of the patriarch Joseph as a young man. Savary, with a humanistic axe to grind, has ‘charmées de sa beauté…’ for the same phrase. Just as Savary deformed the text to turn it into a prettier story, so Ketton deformed it to make it repulsive to decent readers. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 789

Categorization

• XREF: Ketton’s deformation of the Qur’anic Joseph verse parallels how Anidjar and others show ‘Islam’ fabricated as the West’s impure double — the translator’s own venality projected onto the prophet he traduces.
• QUESTION: What is the underlying Arabic word (akbara) and what semantic range does it actually carry? Worth checking the philology.