The organization of religious institutions and spirituality are not synonymous. Islam is itself meaningless without implementation, it provides for unlimited variation just as any text, whether its Marx or the Vedas. You can kill, conquer, destroy, based on anything at all. All of northern India was brutally conquered under a Buddhist flag.
There is nothing inherent to the history of Islam that is different from any other global religion. They were all forged through a combination of politics, war, struggle, difference, exclusion, acts of faith, the written word, and the human spirit. I don't give a flying fuck what the word Islam means. It's a word, ffs, not a brand upon the brain, not seared into the heart of anyone who happens to be born in an Islamic culture, which, in your precious history books, spurred neoplatonism that gave rise to contemporary western philosophy and paved the way for the Enlightenment, for which they suffered greatly. Islamic societies gave us the foundation for so much of what we take to be Western values, and yet WE exclude THEM from the Western world as though they are incompatible. You need to go back to the history books, because whatever you're reading, its leaving you with some big gaping holes.
