Think about what it means to submit to God, to surrender your will to His Will. How is this idea communicated to you? In most cultures, it is as a child, and in most cultures submission to GOD is submission to your PARENTS. The will of God and the pleasure of your parents is conflated, usually for life.
And as an adult this pattern continues. The more rigid the religious code, the more thoroughly you are taught to surrender your will to community leaders. Islam, self evidently, as THE self-defined religion of submission–it is in the name–does this perhaps more rigidly than any other faith.
Plurality of opinion gives way to unity of opinion, and unity of action. This is INHERENTLY unhealthy, uncreative, and works directly to prevent the emergence of individuality, and the individual moral judgment and GROWTH that happens in conditions of freedom.
Put simply, Islam as a creed is probably the least creative religion in the world, for the simple reason that its actual expression consists in rote conformity to rules expressed reasonably clearly in books no one is allowed to question or expand upon, and such conformity attends child raising in the cultures which take their faith seriously.
I would contrast this with Judaism, the members of whose traditions are arguably–I would say certainly–the most creative and productive of any group on Earth. Jews are less than 1% of the world’s population, but have one some 40% of something (large number; I think that is close) of the world’s Nobel Prizes. In its basic patriarchic tendency, and tribalistic certitudes, it is similar to Islam.
I have been wrestling with what differs in it.
First, I would think that there is a life energy created by constant threat of violence, and a constant feeling of being an outsider.
Secondly, I would submit that even though Judaism has mainly male prophets, it also has a number of very important women, like Esther. It is also significant that whereas in Islam the FATHER dictates the religion of the child, in Judaism it is the mother. This is of course much more logical, as there can be no doubt about the maternity of a child. (and it is perhaps because of this that Islam is so harsh on women, and so protective of their virginity). Cultures which value both the feminine and the masculine are in general more balanced. This is a rough and unsubstantiable assertion.
Thirdly, though, I would submit that the sheer number of Judaic cultures as they have developed in the diaspora has more or less necessitated the inclusion of considerable diversity of action. You can be eccentric and genuinely individualistic, yet retain your membership in the group. This is important.
You have orienting beliefs. For example, you have the Ten Commandments, and the whole of the Law (whose Hebrew name I am forgetting at the moment), which consists in roughly several hundred MORE commandments.
Yet, I would submit that the history of Judaism has forced upon it heterogeneity of opinion, individualism within family and small community groupings, and prevented the emergence of a clerical class as exists in Islam, a class which issues fatwas, and the like.
Christianity had such a class. The Catholic Church WAS the government for long stretches of history, and until the very recent past all kings had to keep their respective church in mind when rendering decisions. All of this worked to homogeneity of thought and action.
Could one perhaps say that today submission to authority–to the “experts”–is taught, but that this submission has no moral value unless and until one agrees to the incorporation of political views (socialism in all iterations always having claimed to better manage human life in the form of a better machine) within the larger submission to “science”? Could one not further posit that such submission has psychological value, even as it corrupts the minds of people unfortunate enough to make this Faustian bargain?