Perceived danger from an alien society generates distorted myths about its beliefs

Evidence

Men seem to take it for granted that an alien society is dangerous, if not hostile, and the spasmodic outbreak of warfare between Islam and Christendom throughout their history has been one manifestation of this. Apparently, under the pressure of their sense of danger, whether real or imagined, a deformed image of their enemy’s beliefs takes shape in men’s minds. By misapprehension and misrepresentation an idea of the beliefs and practices of one society can pass into the accepted myths of another society in a form so distorted that its relation to the original facts is sometimes barely discernible. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 40

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism described — that the perception of threat, whether real or imagined, mechanically produces a deformed image of the enemy’s beliefs that then becomes an accepted myth — is a general theory of inter-societal misperception whose scope far exceeds the Christian-Muslim case it illustrates. It’s a paradigm for how any warring or rival societies construct each other.
• SEED: An essay angle: the ‘deformed image under pressure’ mechanism as a general theory of how rival societies construct each other’s beliefs — applicable to Cold War mutual caricature, modern political polarization, and colonial-era misreadings of indigenous religion.
• XREF: Speaks directly to my interest in how perceived threat warps perception of a rival’s actual beliefs — parallels modern scholarship on Orientalism and Orientalizing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 40