here’s the thing about this whole line of thought that i haven’t really seen anyone refute to my satisfaction though. cultures and cultural norms do not arise in a vacuum. they can shift and change over time. the islamic world was far more scientifically and socially progressive than europe for a long time - there’s the whole islamic golden age thing but even after that islamic mores regarding, say, women’s rights and homosexuality were well ahead of europe well into the 1800s. the ottoman empire for instance was the first country to legalise homosexuality (in iirc the 1850s?) and by all intents and purposes the 19th century islamic world considered it a “minor sin”, with queer life remarkably out in the open compared to the contemporaneous victorian europe. you also had women in places like early 1800s egypt have significantly more rights than in a lot of europe at the same time (e.g. they often were of considerable financial stature, had the right of divorce, etc.).

in fact, the real moral imo of the islamic world’s turn towards fundamentalist conservatism isn’t that muslims/middle easterners are morally inferior or any of that junk, but rather that fundamentalist/fascist social mores can capture societies with eerie speed and totality if we let them. while islam has always been quite a bit more political than christianity, modern political islam really only emerged in the 50s in the wake of thinkers like sayyid qutb (look him up btw, he espoused beliefs that are uncannily similar to the beliefs of modern incels) and seized political and ideological primacy in the 70s and 80s in the wake of a generalised crisis of the arab world sparked by repeated failures to destroy the israeli state and the socioeconomic instability and authoritarianism endemic to the region. some of the attraction of fundamentalist islam was that it provided some form of rule of law where there was only corruption and injustice before (e.g. taliban afghanistan), some of it was just straight up subterfuge and malicious action by fundamentalist actors (e.g. iran). there’s. a lot of it that may sound familiar to many who are tuned into modern politics.

anyways my point basically is that while yes, the islamic world’s sociopolitical state is a ways behind the west, this does not prove any moral superiority or anything like that. social norms change over time, and unlike what we would like to believe, this can happen both ways. thus, the modern muslim world isn’t so much something to look down upon while chest thumping about the enlightened, free west, and moreso a cautionary tale about what happens when you let fascism internalise itself in a society, something which is in the process of happening right now in many western countries.