Category

Full Title or Meme

A category is a group of ideas collected under a common heading.

Categorization is a prerequisite of any debate.
Differing religions require a categorization to survive as described by Max^[1]
[In the late] period a considerable proportion of the apologetic writing seems to derive from real debate. This was particularly true in the early Abbasid era, when there were a number of propitious factors: the cosmopolitan nature of Baghdad and its province, the caliphs' patronage of scholarship, the emergence of Arabic as a lingua franca the universal deployment of dialectical reasoning based upon categorical definitions, and the proliferation of converts and apostates, which meant that there were many with a genuine knowledge of two religions and with a real will to champion one over the other. But also, quite simply, there were matters that needed debating. Islam prompted questions that had not arisen before, such as "what were the attributes of a true prophet", and challenged long-cherished assumptions, such as that imperial ascendancy confirmed possession of truth. The latter point did put the non-Muslims on the defensive, especially the Christians and Zoroastrians, but for the Muslims too it was to be no easy contest. They were new at the game and entered the arena with only a weakly articulated confessional identity and an underdeveloped battery of doctrine, and it was thus particularly in the sectarian milieu of eighth and ninth-century Iraq that communal boundaries were staked out and dogmatic territories delineated.