The Western compartmentalization of religion is foreign to Islamic tradition.

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

• DEFINE: Defines the Western assumption of religion as a separable life-compartment and contrasts it with Islamic holism.
• XREF: This is Lewis articulating a strong civilizationist claim about religion’s nonseparation in Islam — a core move in the same representational cluster the reader studies; could be held against Said’s argument that such holistic attributions do epistemic violence.
• QUESTION: Is Lewis’s claim that Western Christianity also once treated religion as separable historically verifiable, or does it idealize medieval Christendom to sharpen the contrast?