Medieval Christian polemicists caricatured Muslim ablutions into a distorted parody.

Evidence

Also early, a matter-of-fact statement passed into Western tradition from Pedro de Alfonso. He described the parts of the body that Muslims wash before they pray ‘that they may have perfect cleanness’, and he subjoined the classic Christian criticism: ‘the relevant thing for prayer is to be cleansed internally, not externally’. Pedro and most other writers after him confused ghus! with wudi’, and it was almost universally asserted that all the body must be washed before the prayer; it was much stressed that this included the private members. Really, where there had been no effusio seminis there would be minor impurity, and therefore no need for major ablution, which it is certainly not customary to perform at each prayer time. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1171

Categorization

• XREF: The misrepresentation of Muslim practice as corrupt externalism parallels the vault’s claims about how Islam is reduced to its negative surface for the West’s self-definition.