Medieval Christian writers admired Islamic worship’s dignity and were willing to copy it

Evidence

What was so much appreciated was a certain seemliness and dignity which have always marked the ancient places of study and of worship in Islam. This was true of the ordinary mosques. Lull would have liked to copy the segregation of sexes for the use of churches, and Giovanni d’Andrea, in his Clementine Gloss, remarked the same thing with favour, and also the way people entered a mosque with bare, washed feet, et cum certa devotione. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1200

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the simple ‘hostile anti-Muslim polemic’ reading—the adoption of Islamic practices by Christian writers crosses over with the reader’s earlier work on cultural exchange and on complaints about modesty. — connects to: Medieval Christians recognized Islamic propriety in mosque cleanliness
• ADDENDUM: The borrowing of Islamic worship decorum—footwashing, sex segregation—directly extends the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ essay as a parallel instance of cross-cultural moral imitation.