system
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human
Was Europe the only Old World civilization to separate philosophy from religion? If so, why is that so?

I am ignorant in philosophy so the following surely contains a lot of misconceptions. Pls pardon and educate me. If I'm being Eurocentric, that's a subconscious bias, I don't mean here to say that Europe is superior and the sorts.

In my layman knowledge, both the philosophies of India and China are intertwined with religion - Buddhism and Confucionism doesn't even have gods, they're just the teachings of the Buddha and Confucius. Afaik the Near East also didn't have a tradition of philosophy until Islam, and Medieval philosophy there is dominated by Islam. Don't know about Persia but I assume philosophy there would also be dominated by Zoroastrian religious teachings.

Even in Europe the Middle Ages was dominated by Christian philosophy, it looks. Why is it that the Ancient Greeks and then EM Europeans (apparently picking up from where the Greeks left) separated their philosophy from religion?
gpt
Actually within the classical Islamic period there was a distinction between rational theology “Kalam” and philosophy or “falsafa”. In the latter philosophy was viewed as a discipline unto itself, where philosophers put reason and philosophy independently and on some level above revelation. 

Granted however they still believed in God and acknowledged the Islamic scriptures, but they never used philosophy to understand or develop their theology or religion. Rather they put philosophy as independent to revelation though they may be inspired by revelation. What this meant was that individuals like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) would have controversial and non-orthodox views. Ibn Rush for example was understood to have proposed a double truth theory in Europe where he seemed to separate philosophy from religion with his double truth theory (it was mistakenly assumed as such) where religion was for the masses and philosophy was for the intellectual
Elites. Ibn Rushd did inspire the western tradition to separate the two as well, in fact he might have even planted the early seeds. The proof of this is the philosophical school in Europe that existed in the late medieval time period known as the Latin Averroists.