The Arabic word for secular was invented in the late nineteenth century

Evidence

One clue to how the secular was thought before the involvement of Egyptian history with the history of the modern West is found in nineteenth-century attempts to translate the term “secular” and its cognates into Arabic. The commonest word used today for the adjectives “secular” and “lay” as well as for “secularist” and “layman” is ‘alma¯niyy. This latter word, now the most commonly used, was invented in the latter part of the nineteenth century. (There is no entry for it or for any of its cognates in Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon compiled in Egypt in the first half of the nineteenth century.) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 981

Categorization

• XREF: The recent coinage of ‘almaniyy’ supports the Asad/Cooper point that ‘secular’ is not a culture-neutral category available before the modern encounter — analogous to how Cooper shows ‘religious freedom’ was strategically redeployed only in recent decades.
• CANDY: A light fact: the everyday Arabic word for ‘secularism’ doesn’t appear in the standard pre-modern lexicon — it was coined in the late 1800s.