The Muslim religious-political unity framing is partly a modern colonial contrastive construct.

Evidence

One result is that for Muslims religion is not, as for Christians, concerned with one part of life, leaving the rest to the State; it is concerned with the whole of life. And its ruling institution is Church and State in one. It was comparatively recently, under Christian influence, that the concept of a separation between lay and ecclesiastical, secular and religious, in other words between Church and State, began to appear, and terms were coined to express this dichotomy. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1392

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the Said-adjacent cluster — Lewis frames the unitary Islam narrative in terms of what Christianity lacks, an archetypal Orientalist contrastive move worth scrutinizing.
• QUESTION: Lewis claims secularism entered Islam ‘under Christian influence’ — does this track chronologically? Worth chasing the genealogy (Ottoman Tanzimat reforms predate heavy Western tutelage).