It lay in the very fact that they did think they had a simpler and saner sort of Christianity, as do many modern Christians.
They thought it could be made universal merely by being made uninteresting.

Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox.
It was exactly because it seemed self-evident, to Moslems as to Bolshevists, that their simple creed was suited to everybody, that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it on everybody.

It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow.
And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule.
Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowed of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord.
As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had the simplest sort of government, monarchy.

There was exactly the same direct spirit in its despotism as in its deism.
The Code, the Common Law, the give and take of charters and chivalric vows, did not grow in that golden desert.
The great sun was in the sky and the great Saladin was in his tent, and he must be obeyed unless he were assassinated.

Those who complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborate Western creeds have produced the elaborate Western constitutions; and that they are elaborate because they are emancipated.
And the real moral of the relations of the two great religions is something much more subtle and sincere than any mere atrocity tales against Turks.