Proximity to Muslims forced Mozarabic polemicists to make their caricatures plausibly realistic

Evidence

Yet the Mozarabic authors base their caricature on knowledge of Islam and write for Christians who are in daily contact with Muslims. They cannot content themselves with fabricating wildly inaccurate tales of the trickster and magician who dupes the Saracens through false miracles. They need to provide their readers with an image of Islam that seems realistic at the same time that it is repellent. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 821

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A subtle point about how the sociology of a polemicist’s audience constrains the form their prejudice can take — realistic distortion vs. wild fantasy as a function of geographic proximity to the target.