Religion, politics and all that...
Carl Schmitt would most certainly agree, as do I, with Wilf's assertion above which see Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
Of course the separation between the omnipotent G-d and the omnipotent lawgiver does not exist in Islam, nor does the separation of church and state. Ironically, it took the Reformation, the rise of humanism (fuelled by the Reformation and the Rennaissance in classical learning) , the Treaty of Augsberg (accepting the division of Christendom into two major sects), the Thirty Years War, the Treaty of Utrecht (sanctioning the balance of power as a principle of international politics and the state as the primary actor in it) and the secularist bias of the Enlightenment (and its incredulity to metanarratives), and the concomitant replacement of the theological epistemology with a rationalist scientific one (although that didn't mean people like Newton and Kant weren't religious) to actually bring about this norm!. Once the Catholic Church's role in legitimating the divine right of kings had been sundered and replaced with nationalism the legitimacy of kings no longer required divine sanction thus paving the way for personal freedom in terms of faith (no longer a political problem with transnational/geopolitical ramifications) and the rise of the national state and the concepts of citizenships, rights, duties, obligations, etc. But the imprint of Christianity, like Roman and Greek civilisation beofre it, was still present in a "sanitised" version (as per Schmitt). Thought we often don't notice people not belonging to our civilisation are the first to pick it up. The separation of church and state, for instance, though sounding secular to us is the equivalence of blasphemy to Muslims given that they see it as an imposition of Christian norms even though we don't use it (or understand it) that way (anymore).All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transformed from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in tha last centuries (p.36)
For an intersting perspective with respect to Islam see, Islam and Globalisation: Secularism, Religion and Radicalism
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