Medieval Christians recognized Islam as morally demanding, not merely permissive

Evidence

Even so we can say that there was in the West some knowledge that Islam was a system of positive requirements, and not only a series of relaxations. Praise of Muslim practice, to shame Christians, equally with attempts to describe Islamic morals, made it clear that to some extent Islam and Christianity drew upon a common stock of precepts. It cannot be said that there was as general a consensus to this effect as there was in condemnation of Islamic laxity, but yet it was important. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1128

Categorization

• XREF: Nuances the vault’s constitutive-outside thesis — the binary was never total; even within dominant polemic there was acknowledgment of shared precepts, a crack in the construction worth preserving.