Shared theological vocabulary made Christian-Muslim polemics intelligible and vicious.

Evidence

Compared with the religions of India, of China and of other places, they are as alike as peas in a pod. This of course is what gives particular virulence to the conflicts between them. When Christians and Muslims argued in the Middle Ages and continued into modern times and each said to the other: “You are an infidel and you will burn in hell,” they understood each other perfectly. Such an argument would have been impossible between either a Christian or a Muslim on one side and a Buddhist or a Hindu on the other. They would not have known what they were talking about. Christians and Muslims understood each other because they both meant the same thing. Their heavens are significantly different but their hells are almost identical. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1036

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Islam-West representation cluster: shared Abrahamic grammar is precisely what made mutual anathematizing legible — a mechanism supplementing Said’s account of how each side rendered the other.
• CANDY: “Their heavens are significantly different but their hells are almost identical” is a compact, quotable line about Abrahamic kinship.
• SEED: Angle: inter-religious polemic is most virulent where the parties share a common symbolic vocabulary — so knowledge production about the ‘infidel’ requires deep prior intelligibility, complicating the pure-otherness picture.