Medieval epics imagined Islam as a parodic mirror of Christian crusade religion

Evidence

The Saracens, through enchantment, have caused a demon, Sathanas, to inhabit the idol of Mahomes, which now speaks to them. “Christians who believe in God,” says Sathanas/Mahomes, “this lost people, have no rights on earth, they have taken it in great error. Let God keep heaven; the earth is in my fiefdom [baillie].” The Califes de Bauda then announces a “rich pardon that Mahons will give us,” a sort of inversion of the indulgences that Urban II granted the crusaders. The caliph says that Mahons will allow every man who fights the Christians to have twenty or thirty wives, or as many as he wishes. Those who die in battle will take to the gates of heaven two bezants in one hand and a rock in the other; with the bezants they can buy their way into heaven, or if that fails, with the rock they can force their way in. Again an inversion or parody, this time of the hope of martyrdom proffered to the Christian crusader. The pagan enemy, it seems, is a deformed mirror image of the righteous crusader, devoted to the devil rather than God, granted indulgences by the caliph of Baghdad/Mecca rather than the Pope, hoping to buy or fight his way into heaven. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 672

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the structural logic of anti-Saracen polemic: Islam presented as devil-worship whose every feature (indulgence, martyrdom, heaven) inverts Christianity — the root mechanism behind modern ‘distorted mirror’ trope analysis.
• XREF: Directly grounds the Anidjar/Aziz vault claims about the Europe-Islam opposition being constructed; shows the mirror-image/parody mechanism at its medieval textual source. — connects to: Dante’s contradictory treatment of Muslims reflects a transitional medieval-to-humanist ideological moment — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 774