That life is innately sacred in the world’s religious traditions is an assumption that permeates most religious studies discourse, especially in the form of the sacred/profane divide—a paradigmatic typology famously associated with Émile Durkheim. Offering a more complicated picture, this chapter takes as its central axis the absence of the sacred/profane divide in the Qur’an. This is not say that Islam holds life to be “not sacred,” but, rather, that such a possible division is hermeneutically linked to other typologies such as that between the human and the animal, and between biology and ethics. A consideration of the sanctity of life in Islam, this chapter argues, cannot be isolated from this wider ecosystem of thought. Relying primarily on Qur’anic semantic analysis—while being fully conscious of the heterogeneity of the Islamic interpretive tradition spanning over a millennia—this chapter traces how the question of the sanctity of life appears in three areas in the Islamic tradition: medicine, art, and political violence.