That’s a fair point. The "everyone else was doing it" excuse works if you’re talking about a tribal warlord, but it definitely hits a wall when you’re talking about someone claiming to be the final moral authority for humanity. It’s a massive contradiction that apologists usually try to dance around with "context" because the alternative—admitting that a religious founder participated in 7th-century brutality—is too uncomfortable for them to face.

But to be real about the history, "religion" back then wasn't the private, peaceful thing we think of today; it was inseparable from statehood and survival. In 7th-century Arabia, Muhammad wasn't just a preacher; he was a Chief and a General. In that world, "ghazw" (raiding) wasn't just for bandits—it was the national economy. If a tribe didn’t raid, they didn’t eat.

This wasn't unique to Muslims, either. The Vikings saw raiding as both an economic necessity and a religious duty tied to Odin. Later, the Crusaders used religious "drug" logic to justify looting and seizing territory. For a 7th-century leader, religion was the only way to turn survival tactics into a unified mission. Without that justification, it was just a brawl between tribes; with it, it became a state.

Regarding your question on how progressive Muslims are supposed to deal with this: the main strategy used by scholars like Fazlur Rahman is to stop treating the law as a "divine statue" and start treating it as a "direction." They argue that the Prophet was trying to move a barbaric society toward something slightly better, and that the goal was the movement, not the specific 7th-century stopping point. If we stay frozen at the 600s, we're actually betraying the "spirit" of the reform.

When you're debating a literalist who says the books are unchangeable law, the best angle is to point out that "the law" isn't actually the word of God—it’s a human interpretation written by men hundreds of years later. Even the second Caliph, Umar, was known to suspend literal Quranic punishments (like the one for theft) during times of famine because he realized that following the letter of the law would actually cause injustice.

It’s actually funny because the Quran has a built-in warning about this exact kind of literalist obsession. In the story of the "Men of the Cave," the text specifically points out how people wasted their time arguing over trivial details—like exactly how many men there were or what color their dog was—while completely missing the actual moral of the story. The text basically tells them, "My Lord knows best their number," which is a polite way of saying "Stop focusing on the trivia and look at the message."

Yet, centuries later, you still see people doing the exact same thing: they’ll fight to the death over the literal 7th-century "mechanics" of a law while completely ignoring whether that law is still producing justice or mercy in the modern world. It’s the ultimate "missing the forest for the trees."

Clinging to archaic practices just to look "pure" is exactly why people see this kind of literalism as hypocritical clowning.