Untranslatable Arabic aesthetics were read as proof of barbarism

Evidence

The language could naturally not be appreciated across the barrier of translation; yet it was felt to be antipathetic. The Cluniac summula mentioned various elements in the Qur’an that Muhammad ‘interwove in his barbarous way’, and Peter the Venerable referred scornfully to a ‘barbaric and unnatural way of speaking’, with which we should probably connect his hostility to ‘poetic figment’. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 330