Polemics define Islam by an alleged refusal to separate religion from politics

Evidence

Muslims not only despise western secular values as decadent, materialistic, corrupt and immoral. They do not accept the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal, the division which in Christian societies confines religion to the margins of everyday life. Instead, for Muslims the whole of human life must represent a submission to God. This means that they feel a duty to Islamicise the values of the surrounding culture. — Matt Carr, You Are Now Entering Eurabia, 59

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the secularism/laicite debates and to Said’s Orientalism — the timeless, monolithic ‘Muslim mind’ is the classic orientalist move.
• ADDENDUM: Extends ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: Phillips’s charge that Muslims reject the spiritual/temporal division is the same political-signaling move as early modern dress-panic rhetoric.
• BMF: Echoes The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid) — Changez is read by Americans as an inscrutable, unassimilable outsider precisely through this ‘they are not like us’ frame.