A good example of this is the war in the Sudan between the British and Sudaneese with the siege of Kharthoum and battle of Omdurman. The Islamic world has been prone to milinarian or messianic outbursts, particularly in Shia Islam with its tradition of the hidden and soon-to-return Mahdi, in much the same way Christian and Jewish communities have interpreted political tension through a religious lens. The exact degree to which one could say these were inherently political or inherently religious responses to tension is a bit of a moot point in an environment where the seperation of those spheres was not understood in modern western terms. One could just as much ask if the Zealots of 1st century BC Palestine were a religious or political movement. Similarly, Lawrence and the Arab revolt comprises elements which were nationalist-political overlaid with religious and ethnic factors.

My point is that the western idea of "seperation of spheres" between the religious, ethnic and political is, historically speaking, quite recent and quite fragile (as we saw in the Balkans in the 1990s). A disagreement about a border or trade arrangement can easily be seen through a religious lens, just as ethnic or religious arguments often have roots in economic or political power relations.