Medieval Western critics attacked Islamic law’s theoretical allowances, not actual Muslim practice

Evidence

If we review the Western approach to Islam over the whole field of morals, we shall be struck by the theoretical, and almost legalistic, character that it assumes. This draws attention to the inexactitude of the theoretical information so obstinately stated. In their assertions about Islamic jurisprudence, Christian writers were perhaps as often wrong as right, yet it was characteristic that they insisted on specifying minutely, for example, the numbers of wives and concubines permitted, and the regulations that governed marriage, divorce and remarriage. Of Muslim practice there can have been practically no information available. Thus it was the number of wives allowed that was the focus of interest, rather than the number Muslims mostly had; it was generally implied, rather naively, that they would always enjoy in practice as many as they could by law. It was the permission for divorce which was given attention, rather than its actual frequency; it was the very idea of a wife’s legalised infidelity (as it appeared to be) in the fahlil, or of coitus interruptus, or, in Spain, of unnatural relations between spouses, rather than any knowledge of the actual occurrence of these things, which gave scandal. If, on the other hand, condemnation of Islamic toleration of homosexual practice was based on observation, the accounts were both exaggerated, and generalised to apply to all ages and all places, ull it was thought (quite falsely) to be permitted by law, and even encouraged by religion. Indignation was so often allowed to outstrip the facts. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 890

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the vault’s construction-of-Islam thesis: the West erects a legalistic straw ‘Islam’ from normative texts rather than lived Muslim practice, parallel to how Razack and Aziz show modern racialization reading Islam from texts/ideology rather than Muslims.
• QUESTION: Does this legalistic text-based vs. practice-based misrepresentation pattern recur across later orientalist periods, e.g. in modern jurisprudence about sharia and honor crimes?