Applying the term feudalism outside western Europe is at best a misleading analogy.

Evidence

The term feudalism, strictly speaking, relates to the west European context from which it emerged. Any use of the word feudalism and other terms associated with it (fief and enfeoffment, vassal, etc.) of other times and places is at best an analogy and can be seriously misleading. … However, the term has become common not only among western historians, who first applied it to the Middle East, but also in the Arab world where, in the loan-translation iqtfia¯iyya, it is used—in a kind of two-layered analogy—as an ideological designation for an old and dis­ approved order. It may therefore be useful to clarify a few points concerning the working of this order in medieval Islamic states, and concerning the changing meanings of the verb aqtfiaa (from qatfiaa, to cut, lop or slice), from which the present-day Arabic equivalent of feudalism is derived. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 344

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that feudalism is a strictly west-European term whose Islamic coinage (iqtaiyya) is a loan-translation with ideological intent.
• XREF: connects to: Western higher culture was feudal because it systematically alienated itself from business. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 285