War and mutual contempt prevented either side from understanding the other’s worship

Evidence

I have referred above to the conversation between Fra Fidenzio and the soldiers of the victorious Muslim army returning to Damascus with so many Christian prisoners from the sack of Tripoli. There was such mutual incomprehension as to reveal a complete failure to relate Christian and Islamic doctrine, and it was natural in conditions of warfare and mutual contempt, when God seemed to smite the Christians in their failure, that there should have been little room on either side for charitable, even for academic, interest in the positive preferences of the worship of opponents. The images found in the churches were subject to war psychosis in a peculiar way. Yet the puzzlement of the Muslim soldiers in Fidenzio’s story, their curiosity and their interest to discuss the matter, clearly implied those different ideas of prayer from which the iconoclasm of the Qur’an sprang. On the Latin side, the defence of images, which were characteristic of the Latin rite, helped to preclude any very clear conception of worship that lacked both images and sacraments. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1140

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Each religion saw the other as a corruption of its own truth. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1039; Modern communal hostilities distort opponents’ views as much as medieval ones did. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1494