Material heaven-language is read spiritually in one tradition and literally in the other.

Evidence

It is interesting to note that the urbs beata Jerusalem, which is roughly contemporary with Muhammad, expresses spiritual delights of Heaven in a material language which Christians, of course, understood only in a spiritual sense. If the idiom of Qur’an and this hymn are similar they have certainly been very differently understood. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 2198

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s Anidjar/Aziz claim about how Islam gets constructed as the West’s material/sensual outside — here the same idiom is interpreted as spiritual when Christian, carnal when Islamic.
• QUESTION: This raises the methodological question of whether medieval Christians truly ‘misunderstood’ Qur’anic paradise or deliberately read it badly — worth chasing further.