Islam traditionally makes no compartmental separation between religion and other life domains

Evidence

When we in the Western world, nurtured in the Western tradition, use the words Islam and Islamic, we tend to assume that religion means the same for Muslims as it has meant in the Western world, even in medieval times: that is to say, a section or compartment of life reserved for certain matters, and separate, or at least separable, from other compartments of life designed to hold other matters. This is not so in the Islamic world. It was never so in the past, and the attempt in modern times to make it so may perhaps be seen in the longer perspective of history as an unnatural aberration that has come to an end in Iran and may also be ending in some other Islamic countries. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1469

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Clarifies the core conceptual difference between Western and Islamic understandings of religion’s scope.

Related

• The Western compartmentalization of religion is foreign to Islamic tradition. (similarity 0.92)
• Islamic classical doctrine divides the world into house of Islam and house of war (similarity 0.82)
• Islam and modern European Christianity hold incompatible conceptions of what religion itself encompasses (similarity 0.81)
• Islam as a generic category is a modern, reductive translation of heterogeneous historical formations. (similarity 0.80)
• The Christian-Muslim divide turns on different models of revelation (similarity 0.80)
• Islamist movements define their program as undoing Westernization rather than rejecting modernity wholesale (similarity 0.79)
• Islam’s selective agreement with Christianity defied medieval categorization (similarity 0.79)
• Islam was judged deficient for differing from Christian structures (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval thought cast Islam variously as heresy, schism, and third revealed law (similarity 0.79)
• Christians could only conceive Islam as derivative of Christian truth (similarity 0.79)
• Religion rather than nationality has been the primary basis of identity in Islam (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval Islam’s worldview inverted onto its own periphery the Orientalist hierarchy (similarity 0.79)
• Islam’s egalitarian message has been continuously contested by older river-valley social orders (similarity 0.79)
• Scholarly representation of Islam was dominated by Western outsiders (similarity 0.79)
• The Muslim religious-political unity framing is partly a modern colonial contrastive construct. (similarity 0.79)