Concept of Citizenship in the Islamic World

"According to Bernard Lewis, the concept of citizenship is completely alien to Islamic thinking. For Lewis, one “noteworthy historical and cultural fact [about the Islamic world] is the absence of the notion of citizenship. There is no word in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish for ‘citizen’ The cognate term used in each language means only ‘compatriot’ or ‘countryman.’ It has none of the connotations of the English word ‘citizen,’ which comes from the Latin civis and has the content of the Greek polites, meaning one who participates in the affairs of the polis. The word is absent in Arabic and the other languages because the idea of _the citizen as participant, of citizenship as participation_ is not there.”