Medieval Christians saw only Christianity or unlimited license as options

Evidence

To them the restraints imposed by the Qur’anic law were genuinely negligible; they could conceive no alternative to Christianity or unlimited licence. If we can do so to-day it is because events have shown it to us; we have to tolerate at home more than Islamic society has tolerated, except in its own more irreligious phases. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1488

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that ‘events have shown us’ intermediate positions — is there a theory of when a middle option becomes cognitively available? Frames of reference expand historically.
• XREF: connects to: Medieval Christians could imagine no middle ground between Christianity and licence