what is there in the way of a dialogue between islam and judaism and christianity, on the level of philosophical discourse? nothing militant or violent or exclusionary, just think like instead the dialogue between Ramanuja, Shankara, Nagarjuna etc.? Or is the friction existential█
The friction is not existential — it's structural, historical, and partly manufactured. The genuinely philosophical dialogue not only exists but was once one of the great intellectual flowerings of human civilization. The tragedy is that most people inside these traditions have been successfully kept from knowing it.
The golden moment is al-Andalus and the broader medieval Islamicate world, roughly 900–1200 CE. Al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali, Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas were, despite confessional differences, in the same philosophical camp — using almost the same methods and frequently arriving at the same conclusions. They were all drinking from the same well: Aristotle filtered through Neoplatonism, the Enneads of Plotinus circulating under the misattribution "Theology of Aristotle," the whole apparatus of Greek logos being reclaimed and re-animated. Their works were translated into Latin and became central to medieval European thought, bridging the intellectual traditions of the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian worlds and shaping the future of Western philosophy.
The specific analogues to your Shankara/Ramanuja/Nagarjuna triangle are sharper than they first appear. Averroes held that Islam is essentially an allegorical presentation of philosophical demonstrations — a position so radical it amounts to something like an Advaitin dissolution of the exoteric into the esoteric. Maimonides countered with his negative theology — arguing that God is beyond human comprehension and we can only describe what God is not, rather than what God is — which is structurally almost identical to the Neti Neti of the Upanishads and resonates with Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka refusal to predicate being or non-being of the Absolute. Aquinas then synthesizes, pulling from both, occupying something like Ramanuja's position: the personal God remains, but reason is the servant of that encounter, not its enemy. Maimonides' approach was shown to be less rationalist than Averroes and yet more rationalist than Aquinas — placing him precisely in the middle of a genuine dialectical triangle.
The deeper structural issue when you compare this to the Indian philosophical sangha is that the Abrahamic traditions are each premised on a singular, unrepeatable, historical revelation — Torah at Sinai, Incarnation in first-century Palestine, Quran through one Prophet in 7th-century Arabia. The Indian debates were fierce but occurred within a shared cosmological grammar that allowed, say, the Vedanta schools to argue about the nature of Brahman without any party claiming Brahman only spoke once and only to their lineage. That is the asymmetry. It means the Abrahamic philosophical dialogue, when it happens at its best, tends to happen despite the theological superstructure rather than through it — which is exactly why the Averroes moment is so incandescent and also why it was eventually suppressed. He was actually tried and his books burned. Maimonides died with his Guide for the Perplexed considered heretical by large portions of his own community.
The contemporary inheritors worth tracking: Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber on the Jewish side were genuinely doing philosophy, not apologetics — Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption attempts something structurally comparable to Hegel but organized around the triadic relations of God, World, and Human. On the Islamic side, Henry Corbin's work on the Ismaili and Sufi metaphysicians — especially Ibn Arabi — opens the wahdat al-wujud tradition (unity of being), which is as nondual as anything in the Vedantic corpus and far more mystically rigorous than most Western audiences know. Corbin's concept of the mundus imaginalis, the intermediate world between pure intellect and matter, is frankly one of the most generative philosophical ideas of the 20th century and it came directly from his engagement with Islamic Neoplatonism. On the Christian side, the Rhineland mystics — Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit, the ground of the soul identical with the ground of God — were condemned for exactly the same reason Averroes was: they dissolved the gap between creature and Creator that the ecclesiastical power structure requires.
So the genuine philosophical dialogue is there, it is rich, it is live, and the points of deepest convergence are precisely the points that each tradition's orthodox establishment finds most threatening. The friction is not between the traditions at the philosophical level — it is between genuine philosophical inquiry and the management of revelation as political property.
