Medieval Christian polemicists fixated on Muslim sexuality over graver legal issues

Evidence

Islamic rules about witnesses, but not, strangely, to those that disqualified Christians from testifying in court cases that came before the qadi.**® Discrepancy between the Qur’anic and Mosaic laws of witnesses mysteriously irritated Ricoldo, who pointed to it with that triumphant air characteristic of his work whenever he felt that he or his source had unearthed some particular conclusive and self-evident absurdity. What he thought so significant in this now escapes us. There might well have been more attack than there was upon the acceptance of magical practices in Muslim society.®° Little polemic use was made of the Islamic seclusion of women.®! The serious criticism of Islam that it made no provision for restitution in cases of injury was not raised widely.®* None of these points loomed very large in the mediaeval tradition which was always dominated by the consideration of Islamic lubricity. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 848

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did the mediaeval polemical tradition fixate on lubricity and neglect the restitution-of-injury issue, which would seem a more substantively damaging legal criticism? Worth chasing the historiography.
• XREF: Connects to other moral-panic history: the pattern of fixating on sexual transgression (lubricity) while ignoring functional-failure critiques parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of sexualized moral panic masking structural issues. — connects to: Polemical categories like adultery fail when applied to another religion’s marriage law; Christian horror at Muslim divorce masked an unspoken fear of polyandry; Christian polemicists portrayed medieval Muslim sexuality as wholly unregulated (+3 more)