No religion remains peaceful for long when it can manage to get political power for itself. It's like an 8 year old who steals the car keys or finds a loaded gun.
Islam differs from Christianity only in the fine details of its doctrines. But those details are entirely irrelevant. It's all the product of human invention from stem to stern.
The salient point - the only point, really - is that the adherents of religion remove Reason and Empiricism from their rightful throne and replace them with something else. It does not matter whether that something else is reverence for the mythological stories of illiterate nomadic goat herders, belief in the healing power of crystals, blind obedience to Chairman Mao, or the worship of an invisible Chameleon who poops Reese's Pieces.
Any ideology, however well-intentioned, that uses something other than observable, testable, falsifiable reality as the basis for its epistemology can be hijacked and used by the unscrupulous to gain power over the ignorant or the unwary. And when that happens, there is no knowing how bad the outcome will be. It can be mild and localized badness like a shunning, or it can be widespread and deadly badness, like the formation of the Soviet Union.
If a religion does manage to accomplish something good, it's only because of some amazing bit of good luck. But notice that, for every religion, the best one can ever hope for is that the good will outweigh the bad by some narrow margin.
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