Islamic culture is a term primarily used in secular academia to describe the cultural practices common to historically Islamic peoples. As the religion of Islam originated in 7th century Arabia, the early forms of Muslim culture were predominantly Arab. With the rapid expansion of the Islamic empires, Muslim culture has influenced and assimilated much from the Persian, Bangladeshi, Turkic, Pakistani, Mongol, Indian, Malay, Somali, Berber, Indonesian, Greek-Roman Byzantine, Spanish, Sicilian, Balkanic, Filipino and Western cultures.
Islamic culture is itself a contentious term. Muslims live in many different countries and communities, and it can be difficult to isolate points of cultural unity among Muslims, besides their adherence to the religion of Islam. Anthropologists and historians nevertheless study Islam as an aspect of, and influence on, culture in the regions where the religion is predominant.
The noted historian of Islam, Marshall Hodgson, noted the above difficulty of religious versus secular academic usage of the words "Islamic" and "Muslim" in his three-volume work, The Venture Of Islam. He proposed to resolve it by only using these terms for purely religious phenomena, and invented the term "Islamicate" to denote all cultural aspects of historically Muslim peoples. However, his distinction has not been widely adopted, and confusion remains in common usage of these article