The obvious conclusion from Muslim success was that God preferred Islam.

Evidence

Countless Christians, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, found themselves in Riccoldo’s predicament: confronted by an expanding, dynamic Muslim civilization, they needed to make sense of it. In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. How was God’s apparent abandonment of his Christian Empire to be explained? … How were Christians to respond? The simplest and obvious choice, for many, was to accept the logic of Muslim expansion; God must indeed prefer Islam; historical destiny and social pressure offered strong arguments in favor of conversion to Islam. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 47

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the vault’s one-directional ‘Christians demonized Islam’ narrative: initially the natural inference was divine endorsement of Islam, making conversion the baseline response and demonization the secondary, effortful move.