Medieval polemicists fabricated Muslim inferiority to justify Christian superiority claims.

Evidence

Yet prejudice could always overcome observation. Lull went so far as to stress the benefactions habitually made by Christians to churches, monasteries and hospitals for the poor, the sick and travellers; and he added opprobriously: ‘But I never heard that the Muslims have more than two hospitals, one Tunisian and the other in Alexandria.’ Muslims have always been deservedly famous for precisely the things for which he here praised Christians exclusively. … For Lull, who, in his eccentric way, gave this problem more thought than most other Christians did, the Muslim failure to maintain a clerical establishment on a scale comparable to the Christian was another inherent evidence of the inferiority of Islam in the service of God. He combined a somewhat modern perception which stressed the absence of sacraments in a priestless religion with that intellectual clowning to which he was so prone. The Christian Church, he said, had ten clerics for every Muslim cleric, and for every prayer made by the Muslim cleric ten or more were made by the Christian. This quantitative assessment of prayer seems to ignore the orisons of the Christian laity as statistically negligible, as well as those of ordinary Muslims. Similarly he claimed that Christians honoured their Church because they had Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops and so on, whose excommunications the rich, the powerful and the people all feared alike. It was not so with the Muslims: ‘their Bishops are poor men, and so are their priests; and they have wives and children, and really the greater proportion take part in trades .. .’ What this author here so clearly but not altogether intentionally reveals is the popular character of Muslim worship, the organisation of the religious duties which constitute it, communally rather than clerically. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1252

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault cluster on Islam as the West’s constitutive outside — here medieval Christian polemic over lack of sacrificial/clerical ‘dignity’ prefigures modern arguments Razack and Anidjar document. — connects to: Muslims were constituted as an inferior race via the figure of Homo islamicus.
• FICTION: The ‘quantitative assessment of prayer’ — counting prayers between religions — could seed a satirical scene where clerics literally tabulate devotions as competitive scorekeeping.