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I know this was the case for Christianity, but was it for Islam? AFAIK in Muslim lands religion was more of a grassroots thing since there wasn't a capital C Church like in Europe. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but if I've got my history right Islam served as a justification for a caliph's claim to power but wasn't really bent by individual rulers, as the most influential scholars (and the, again, mostly grassroots scholarly community at large) were their own people and not beholden to the state more than an average citizen.
Islam started with the rulers being the head of the church. Not as a completely separate entity adopted by the rulers like Christianity. Most of Islamic traditions in the Hadith is traced back (with very little supporting evidence) to the original founders. The Hadith was the "oral tradition" of what Mohamed said written down a century or two after his death by "scholars" who totally were not fully funded and directed in any way by the rulers.
The Hadith has everything from religious practices to economic laws. These laws amazingly create social classes of elites and everyone else. The elites control the state, military, and religion completely. The non-elites are essentially banned from any legal economic engagement other than worker for an elite. This has created extreme social inequality in most Islamic states today.
Again, there's no church in Islam. The ruler has no authority to actually make religious decision. Islam doesn't have a Pope.
Okay I'm not sure what you mean by "with very little supporting evidence". There's a whole branch of Islamic scholarship solely concerned with narrators and their reliability, and a lot of Hadith was written down before Muhammed's death and during the time of his companions. Hadith was compiled 1-2 centuries after Muhammed's death, but that compiling wasn't writing down oral tradition, as most (or at least a lot of, my knowledge of the specifics is fuzzy) Hadith was written by that point. What happened in that time period was scholars journeying all over the Caliphate and gathering Hadith that was already preserved and written down.
I mean yes exactly. This isn't myth; these were real things that were done and written down by real people. If they were directed by the rulers someone would've written that down.
Okay you'll need to provide examples because I'm not aware of a single law that does what you're talking about.