The crusade-era idol of Muhammad flourished among the illiterate through war-addled popular poetry

Evidence

It is naturally among the illiterate that we find the crudest approach. The proletarian appeal of the Conquéte de Jérusalem — a poem that combines the more fantastic tendencies of the chansons de geste with the cruel ethos of Crusading warfare — explains the only description known to me of the actual ‘idol’ of Muhammad and its adoration. It was conceived in vulgar splendour: … In this popular table, Peter the Hermit, taken prisoner of war, and required to ‘adore’ the ‘idol’, does so quite happily: … To the poet this inglorious mental reservation is a smart trick which he much admires, and the Hermit figures henceforward as a Christian spy, with all the glamour of Reynard the Fox. We are very far here from the spirit of martyrdom or witnessing to Christ, and very tar from the principles of moral theology. These ideas flourished only where literary imagination was worked on by war psychosis, in an atmosphere of illiteracy. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1758

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the medieval fabrication-of-the-other theme, e.g. how crusaders invented an idol in Mecca as a mirror of their own saint-worship anxieties — resonates with polemic-as-projection studies. — connects to: The crudest Muslim-idol beliefs flourished among the illiterate