Allan-While I probably agree with you about the beginnings of Islam, I’m sure we don’t agree about the inception of modern christianity. However I do see a dichotomy as well.
I define modern christianity as beginning with the council of nicea. Constantine claimed the reason for his victory was because of the christian god. Then he convened the council to doctrinize it. This, IMO, was an attempt to keep the roman empire together which the western portion was beginning to collapse. I see that making it a state recognized religion as a political move over the population with it’s dogmatic aspects. The people were clinging to the jesus story because of the resistance meme and constantine went for it and made it official. In a sense corrupting the religion with the state for political purposes.
My interpretation of pre-nicea christianity was jewish mysticism with the messiah adopting the pagan mangod(jesus aka Osiris, Attis, Bacchus, Dionysus, and Mithra) because of the mythology attached to it. Kind of a synthesis of several religions going on. But I don’t think there was a historical man jesus.
Just as Muhammad used a religion with very similar mythology to the other abrahamic religions to start an empire which he did by the sword. At the time other kingdoms were breaking down and tribes emerged so oppression was needed to create a centralized state as the people had a inherent distrust of a state or empire. They had just undergone an environmental and ecological crises to break up their kingdoms before Islam. You can see the tribal mentality today in afghanistan and some Pakistan. Which is what makes afghanistan so hard to conquer for modern militaries. Tribal structure is fluid and unstructured very much not like a military.
So the dichotomy I see is Christianity was used to maintain a declining empire and Islam was used to start one.
As for modernity, the Islamic renaissance led to the foundation of scientific thinking with the creation of the scientific method and huge advances in all sciences from about 900-1200AD. They invented peer review medicine, the foundations for modern physics and astronomy. They even had a guy studying evolution about 700 years before darwin. During this time they also had a policy of gathering all the worlds knowledge and translating it to Arabic which preserved a lot of ancient knowledge that would have been lost, this was eventually given to the crusaders to bring back to europe. While they had a thriving merchant economy, Christians had a landholding nobility argicultural economy. As well as the highest literacy rate of the time period. What did they attribute to their success over this period? The Koran.
In a very real sense, they laid the foundation for western civilization along with greek philosophy and sciences leading to the european scientific revolution and enlightenment. Which early scholars attributed to christianity.
After that period the crusaders invaded from the west and the mongols from the east and that was that. What did the attribute to the decline. Allah was mad at them. Then arose the ottoman empire.
Now fast forward to today.
To blame their backwardness today solely on their religion would be discounting one of the most influential periods in the history of the world.
Because during the middle ages they were modernity.
Maybe things go in cycles that are out of our control?
