Muslim military success suggested to Christians that Muhammad’s theology might be divinely favored

Evidence

What troubled Riccoldo most is that God should permit (even seem to condone) the “blasphemies” of the Koran. “As You know, frequently, as I read the Koran in Arabic, with great grief and impatience in my heart, I would place this book on Your altar, before the image of You and your holy mother and say: ‘Read! Read what Muhammad says!’ And it seemed to me that You did not want to read.” … Yet to Riccoldo, overwhelmed by Muslim victories and mocked by non-Christians in Baghdad, these “blasphemies” are all the more perplexing. Can it be true, he asks Jesus, that you are, as the Saracens say, one of them? That would indeed explain why you favor them. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1242

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The psychological mechanism — reading the rival’s scripture aloud before God’s altar and interpreting divine silence as possible endorsement — inverts apologetics into near-conversion through empirical defeat. Rich enough to sit with.
• SEED: Essay angle: how empirical outcomes (military victory) get read as divine verdicts, and how conquerors’ theology annexes the conquered’s God.