Medieval Christians derided Muslim bodily pleasures to affirm intellectual superiority

Evidence

There was a clear note of contempt: this, said Alan of Lille, was no sufficient reward for a martyr’s death. It was at once disgusting and ridiculous: ‘to eat gluttonously, to wanton and to lie with women indefinitely’. Often the use of strong epithets marked the degree of disapproval, vanissimae fantasiae, insaniae et deliramenta.** Such remarks appealed to intellectual snobbery, whether an actual consideration of philosophical reasons followed, or not. … With these attitudes of contempt was allied a sense of unreality sharply expressed: ‘what will Paradise be, but a tavern of unwearied gorging and a brothel of perpetual turpitude?’ — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 821

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault cluster on how ‘Islam’ is constructed as the West’s constitutive outside, and specifically to the Complaints About Immodesty article’s theme of disgust directed at others’ bodily pleasure as identity signaling.