What happened in the ME had nothing to do with Islam. Maybe u can show me verses that Allah encourage Arabs to fight against each other?
Example Saud and Iran or Iraq and Iran. All pure politics, greed and power. They have been warned in the Quran. Just like the Jews been warned in the Quran. Yet the latter transgressed.
I don't read heavy stuff too much, so I don't know any verses for or against. All I know is how people I meet behave. I've also come to believe that religion and people influence each other. I'm talking largely about the history of the Middle East and also the history of religion and how it came to be. A lot of the Middle Easterners I met are very different from the people of South East Asia. Almost total opposite. I think it's because they live in a harsh desert, whereas we live in a lush tropical environment. Both will give rise to very different people.
As for the history of religion. It all started from Judaism. For Christians and Muslims, their faiths are totally derived from Judaism . They then started changing according to fit the requirements of the people who lived in those areas. I think it might interest you to know that the originally the Jews or their ancestor tribes were polytheistic. They believed in many gods. At some point, the proto-Jews transitioned into worshipping a single god. El. In Hebrew, it is known as Elah. Translated into Arabic, it is Allah. This is a picture of a statue of the supreme god of the ancient Canaanites, Elah in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic.
The transition of the proto-Jewish tribes belief from polytheism to worshipping Elah/Allah alone is unknown to me, but I think it's a few hundred years BCE. It is worth noting that at the beginning there were two chief gods, El and Asherah and whole bunch of lesser gods. It is also worthy to note that these were usually derived from Egyptian or Mesopotamian gods. In short, it is a sure bet that Elah/Allah did not exist even in the imagination some 5000 years ago when humans had already begun farming for thousands of years already.
One very interesting feature was that a lot of the gods were associated with certain things or places. For example, Baal was the god of thunder. (Like Thor!), So what would happen was one city would worship Baal and another city would worship Astaroth goddess(!) of war. People familiar with reading fantasy books will recognize these two names as names commonly associated with demons. What actually happend was when the cities went to war, they literally demonized the followers of the other cities and their god. And somehow it stuck around to this day.
Here's a picture of a statue of Baal :
and Astaroth :
These ended up looking like this after lots of fanciful stories told by the winners who followers of another god :
and
all because their followers and cities were the losers of war.
I hope you find this interesting!
