Medieval Christians invented a distorted Muslim Trinity as mirror of their own faith

Evidence

At first, however, it is likely that the Latins, who had no experience of religions other than their own, could only imagine error taking the form of extravagance along familiar lines. If Christians worshiped a Trinity, so (they imagined) must Moslems, but an absurd one; if Christians worshiped their Founder, so (they imagined) must Moslems, but with depraved rites suitable to a depraved man and a depraved people. — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 186

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete mechanism of systematic projective misreading — same dynamic as modern mirror-imaging of rivals. — connects to: By 1250 the unity-of-God doctrine was common Christian knowledge about Islam; Muslims rejected the Trinity as polytheism and carnal generation; Christians misread Islamic ritual by assuming it mirrored their own

Related

• By 1250 the unity-of-God doctrine was common Christian knowledge about Islam (similarity 0.85)
• Medieval Muslims attacked Christian Trinity and Incarnation as blasphemous polytheism (similarity 0.84)
• Muslims rejected the Trinity as polytheism and carnal generation (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval Christians understood Islam only as a distorted copy of Christianity (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval Christians held an irreducibly equivocal attitude toward Qur’anic Christology (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval Christians classified Muslims as sharing monotheism with Christians but trinitarian denial with Jews (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval thinkers treated any non-Trinitarian concept of God as wholly defective (similarity 0.82)
• Each religion saw the other as a corruption of its own truth. (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christian writers assumed Muslim doctrine derived from misinterpreted Scripture (similarity 0.81)
• Christians misread Islamic ritual by assuming it mirrored their own (similarity 0.81)
• Trinity disputes dominated Christian thinking about Islam rather than God’s unity (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christian polemicists understood Islam’s Trinity objection despite lacking sympathy (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christians read the Qur’an as inadvertent testimony to Christian truth (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval theologians cited the Qur’an as implicit proof of the Trinity (similarity 0.81)
• A thirteenth-century missionary argued Muslims already believe the Trinity (similarity 0.80)