Medieval Christians explained Islamic sensuality through climate and race theories.

Evidence

Muhammad taught whatever he thought would best please, and especially lust, which was the particular temptation of orientals, who live in a climate of great natural heat. It was often said that there was something brutish as well as carnal in the Arabs, or in the religion which was suited to their tastes. Islam positively exploited universal human weakness: ‘the religion that he established and the commandments that he gave were such as men are prone to even without commandments’. … Thus Islamic morals were attacked on Scriptural grounds and on grounds of the natural law; probably it was not fully understood that Muslims have no concept of natural, as opposed to revealed, law. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 815

Categorization

• XREF: The climatological-racial explanation of Islam’s ‘carnality’ parallels how Razack and the vault cluster show the Racial Muslim constructed through territorialized bodily difference. Also echoes Said’s Orientalism on the eroticized East.
• QUESTION: The claim that Muslims lack a natural/revealed law distinction is consequential — is this accurate, and does it feed a specifically legal construction of Islam as outside Western jurisprudence?