This mixture of rhetoric, war, and play can also be found in the competitions of the Muslim theologians.
Competition is an outstanding feature of the whole development of Scholasticism and the Universities…….. the split between the Realists and the Nominalists, was probably agonistic at bottom and sprang from the fundamental need to form parties on a point at issue. Partisanship is inseparable from cultural growth. The point at issue may be a relatively unimportant one, though in this case it was crucial for the human mind; the controversy is still unresolved today. The whole functioning of the medieval universities was profoundly agonistic and ludic…. Erasmus was fully aware of this when he complains, in a letter to his stiff-necked opponent Noel Bedier, of the narrowness of the Schools which only deal with material handed down by their predecessors and, in a controversy, ban any point of view that does not conform to their own particular tenets. “In my opinion ,” he says, “it is quite unnecessary to act in the Schools as you act when playing cards or dice, where any infringement of the rules spoils the game. In a learned discussion, however, there should be nothing outrageous or risky in putting forward a novel idea.”