Medieval Christian polemicists projected their own violence onto a monolithic Islam to justify crusade

Evidence

There was little recognition that Christians were inconsistent to advocate the use of force against Islam, while condemning Islam for its theoretic approval of the use of force; and again, to cut themselves off from Islamic society, while despising Muslims for ‘refusing to dispute’. … The absence of any real possibility of dispute, combined with this fear of failure as a Providential punishment, may explain the preference for a violence which allowed the relief of feelings without any necessity for ratiocination. It may explain why, when violence of a military nature and directed against the enemy was impossible, there was a movement which sought to provoke martyrdom, an extracting of violence out of the enemy’s disposition. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 746

Categorization

• XREF: This directly evidences the vault’s core claim about how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive opposite personified — mirroring Aziz’s The Racial Muslim and Anidjar’s enemy-genealogy framework. The projection-of-one’s-own-violence mechanism also parallels Said’s Orientalism. — connects to: Orthodox Islam and Christianity hold mutual heresy accusations rooted in Crusade history — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 784
• DEEPTHINKING: The pseudo-psychological thesis — that the refusal to genuinely engage Islamic theology, combined with providential fear, displaced open debate into sanctioned violence and even self-sought martyrdom — is a dense, counterintuitive causal account of crusade ideology worth sitting with.