I am going to quote my mum on this as we often have discussions regarding religion, she's a Christian I am an atheist so she keeps telling me "When you're older, you'll realize that you were being an idiot and become a Christian, everyone in our family went through that". Anyhow in regards to Islam, she is very opiniated. Classing all of the Muslims as terrorists is a common misconception of an ignorant peasant, however they do have an increasing amount of extremists that do all in their power to wreck havoc onto the world, I have lived in a Muslim centric country for a GOOD part of my childhood, hell I've even experienced a bomb blast, not directly but it was not too far away. I got to say in terms of equality WITHIN Islam, it's great, everyone are treated as equal in Islam no matter if you're Asian/Black/White, but if you're Christian it's shunned upon, I don't think that they're at the stage yet where they accept other religions as having some grain of truth, only the modern ones do, which are far and between. I agree with the OP, I think that the Muslims are experiencing their "Islamic Renaissance", it's just that they're frowned upon by the now developed Christians who are being hypocrites in this case as they've been through exactly the same period(Crusades and whatnot).
Bottom line is, I'd like to make an observation, most, if not all of the developed countries were at some point Church dominated, so Christianity as at the centre of their values whereas most of the countries where Islam is rampant are currently lagging behind and can be classed as "third world countries" with either Dictator at the brink or some sort of oppresionist rule. If that doesn't tell you something in regards to impact that a religion makes, I don't know what does.
Disconnect and self destruct, one bullet a time.
