In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries three religions ran into the same problem: how do you square revelation with Aristotle? The God of the Bible and the Qur'an created the world and speaks to people. Aristotle's God is the unmoved mover, unreachable and impersonal. These are not the same thing. Maimonides, Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas worked at this task independently of one another — and arrived at different answers. It is precisely in that divergence that the difference between the three traditions can be seen.
Maimonides is the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. His "Guide for the Perplexed" was written for an educated Jew who has read Aristotle and now does not know how to read the Torah. Maimonides answers: the literal reading of Scripture is for those who cannot think in any other way. For the philosopher, allegory stands behind the letter. God has no attributes — one cannot say that He is good or wise: one can only say that He is not evil and not foolish. This is apophatic theology at its most rigorous.
Avicenna created Islamic metaphysics: God is the Necessary Existent, that which cannot not exist. Everything else is possible existence: it may be, and it may not be. This is an Aristotelian argument built into Islamic theology. But Avicenna went further than reason: in his Sufi treatises he described the mystical ascent of the soul to God — an experience that does not fit into syllogisms. Both paths lived in him: the philosopher and the mystic.
Thomas Aquinas knew both Maimonides and Avicenna — and took issue with both. His synthesis: reason and faith go to one and the same truth by different roads. Philosophy can prove the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, natural law. Faith opens what reason will never reach on its own: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection. This is not a contradiction — it is a completion. Western Christianity chose this path. And it is walking it still.
If three traditions read one Aristotle and one God so differently — does that not mean that the point lies not in the source, but in who is doing the reading?