"It was a commonplace in medieval accounts of kings that in fact the Muslims are incarnations of the demons, while the Hindu king who wages war against them is an incarnation of one of the Hindu Gods, whose function it is to descend to earth in human form and extirpate the demons, thus winning one more round in the on-going battle between the Gods and the demons (§). The comparison, then, that the Muslims do no more against the divine images than the demons have always done against the Gods themselves, suggests this deeper identification."