Medieval Christians suspected Muslims of secretly preserving pagan cults

Evidence

There does seem to have been a genuine lingering suspicion in some quarters that Muslims were only incompletely de-paganised, despite their ostensible teaching, and even that they actually were crypto-polytheists. This point was made some ten years ago by Grégoire in his stimulating discussion of the problem. He concentrated on the idea that the cults of the Jahiliyah were deliberately preserved in the Ka‘bah. He suggested that this suspicion might have entered Christendom from Rabbinic writers known to Pedro de Alfonso. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1766

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Anidjar’s claim that medieval Christian polemic cast Islam as an incomplete or failed conversion — Muslims as never fully de-paganised parallels the vault’s framing of the Jew-Arab as perpetual incomplete others.
• QUESTION: The Grégoire theory tracing this suspicion to Rabbinic writers via Pedro de Alfonso is worth chasing — could connect crypto-Judaism accusations to crypto-paganism accusations as a shared cognitive template.