Medieval crusade rhetoric framed Muslims as objects of conversion or extermination

Evidence

St Bernard called upon the faithful to ‘defend’ their Lord in His own land (zm terra sua); he envisaged only the conversion or the extermination of the Muslims living there. Vitry’s Historia is calculated precisely to show how Islam seduced the East from Christendom; in the same way Roderick saw Muhammad as the seducer of Spain. This was more than a general way of thinking. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 625

Categorization

• XREF: The seducer-of-Christendom trope recurs in Razack and Aziz’s accounts of how Islam is feminized and sexualized as a threat to the West. — connects to: Crusade rhetoric racialized Muslims as a vile and accursed race. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 12