Actually you’re both generalizing too much (aka prejudicing), IMHO.

For example the largest muslim country in the World is … Indonesia. They’re pretty moderate.

Further, Islam is split in Xiites and Sunites and it’s the latter (which is the majority one in such “wonderful” places as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) that has the most intolerant types (though Iran is majority Xiite and its government is a pretty shit bunch of theocrats).

Generalizing either “good” or “bad” over all Muslims would be like claiming that all Christians are like the ones in the Filipines (were some the faithful will do their own version of Christ’s Via Sacra, complete with getting crucified, to show their faith) or the deep south in the US (no explanation needed ;)) or if trying to make the opposite point go all about how the handful of highly educated Lutherans in Northern Europe are so discrete and unimposing in how they practice their faith.

Really, it’s not Islam, it’s some (maybe most, maybe not) Muslims and it’s religious governments in general (plenty of examples of all religions: for example, look at the current Hindu-nationalists in India) who use religion to control the undereducated (religious belief inverselly correlates with formal education).

And @hopelessbyanxiety@lemmy.world absolutelly, people with very little education tend to be far easy to say with any old bollocks. For example, even though I have a Degree and am a city dweller, my grandmother was illiterate from a crushingly poor farmer background and she actually believed soap operas were real and got very confused when she saw the same actor is different ones. It’s nothing to do with race, it’s to do with not even having the tools to be able to understand things beyond your little local bubble (which in the case of peasents, is really small), so much more easy prey for sophisticated types in positions of authority leveraging “tradition”.

I think you’re falling into the very trap you accuse others of falling into and projecting your own life experience on the “undeveloped” and thinking they can be just as knowing as everybody else: they can’t, not because they don’t have the physical capability but because they didn’t have the opportunities you had at school to acquire the necessary tools to find and understand most information out there, so they are reliant on world of mouth to “understand” the broader world and tend to defer to people in positions of authority (like religious leaders). Even the ones who can read and write are often behind a language barrier which is often very local (just one country or even smaller) and thus unable to see beyond what the (often very controlled) local media shows them.

The baseline of knowledge and even of ability to practice strict rationality of people in the absence of a system of Formal Education is very low, and staggeringly so for those who lived their whole lives in the little village were born in, the latter of which is even most people in most countries (even so called “developed” ones) which is probably why you get most suppory for conservative and even ultra-religious politics from the countryside, not the cities (Turkey is a perfect example).

Mind you, there are plenty of other ways in which people are restricted to information bubbles (even in the English speaking world) and are unable to reason with strict logic and do actual analysis of what they hear, and those often boil down to never having been taught the tools to think in a structured, logical way or to at last do a little logic check for everything you hear, even if coming from the “right people”, hence how you end up with the plenty of supporters of moronic destructive policies, even in the “developed” countries.