Medieval Christians interpreted Muslim ablutions through their own categories rather than Islam’s

Evidence

Muslim praying, and Ricoldo in his I¢tznerarium.3® These were spontaneous reactions to factual observations, instead of theoretical disquisitions. The Liber Nicholay supposed the Prophet to have taught just that men should pray for forgiveness (in the words of the psalm, Miserere met, Deus, etc.) at the ablution. It was more usual to say that the washings were a false baptism, or imitation of baptism, and to administer the reproof that what was really required was penitence, or interior, not exterior, cleanliness; Muslims were even corrected for having thought that baptism (represented by this false washing ) and not confession was for the remission of habitual sin.°° In the light of so much interpretation in terms chiefly Christian, the curious stress upon the cleansing in the ablution of the sexual parts ought perhaps to be seen as reflecting the importance given to Islamic sexual sin in all mediaeval polemic. … The sermonising about interior cleanliness was probably inevitable, particularly as there is relatively little Christian ritual of impurity and cleansing to provide a standard of reference.4! This subject reveals some familiar aspects of the Christian legend of Islam — interpretation in Christian terms, unwillingness to consider the actual intentions of Islam, and sometimes indignant, horrified scandalisation at a fiction of the Christians’ own imagining. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1173

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates/documentalizes vault claim — this medieval projection pattern (reading the Other through one’s own categories and being scandalized at one’s own fiction) is an early instance of the West constituting Islam as its inverted image that Anidjar/Aziz trace into the racialized present.