Polemical slanders traveled as literary tropes detached from local reality

Evidence

In particular a passage in Vitry piles one form of unnatural vice upon another, and includes this form, which can only have derived from the maghrib, where Maliki law obtained; it can never have had any relevance to Syria, where Vitry wrote; his source must, therefore, have been literary, perhaps spiced by oral malice. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 786

Categorization

• XREF: Confirms slander circulates as literature, disconnected from actual local Islam — directly parallels how contemporary Islamophobia circulates through text detached from Muslim reality (Aziz/Razack).
• QUESTION: Vitry writing in Syria a Spanish trope with no local relevance — worth tracking how this literary-circulation mechanism recurs across epochs.