Why is it that the people of these faiths, who claim to believe in the same Deity, are killing each other over the details?
On a deep level, as has been the contention of some of the posts in these comments, they aren’t believing in the same deity. But, since the deity of the Jews (and lesser extent Christians) has some qualities that the Muslims want for their deity Allah, they find a need to try to tie their “new” deity back to the deity of the Jews.
I find myself using Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” hypothesis to explain at least part of the Muslim-Jew hatred. Muhammed knew how inferior anything the Arab culture had created, or could have created at that stage of development, was to the Hebrew deity, so he had to re-interpret that deity through a rhetorical strategy of denigrating the Hebrew scriptures as corrupt, which isn’t too, too hard in an illiterate society that knows nothing of true historical analysis.
