Medieval Christian writers idealized Muslim solidarity to shame Christian infighting

Evidence

Thus the army of legitimate authority can say to the army of the rebel chief, ‘Are we not all Muslims? It is not permissible to fight among ourselves. Let only he who rebelled against his lord be given up, and let us all be in peace.’ To this Ricoldo remarked: “Indeed, they so nourish harmony and love among themselves that they really do seem to be brothers; for talking among themselves, also, and especially to strangers, one says to another, O son of my mother …’ Again, this was an exaggeration; he said that a Muslim might always travel with safety among Muslims; but the basic fact that he asserted was true. His purpose was constantly one of edification: ‘they who have a religion of killing and death do not wish to kill each other, and wretched Christians, who have a religion of life and commandments of peace and love, kill each other without any mercy’. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1089

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Strikingly parallels the moral-panic article’s thesis: complaints about the other religion’s conduct are really political signal about one’s own community’s failings — here Christian writers praising Muslim virtue to indict Christian vice.
• SEED: Angle: how enemy-superiority discourse — praising the rival faith to indict one’s own — operates across millennia, from Ricoldo to modern ‘X does Y better than we do’ commentary.