Shared values makes for good friends. I think that's why Freeps works so well.
No, I was quite liberal at the time. Just most of the Muslims I knew were real a**holes. Angry, selfish, klannish, boorish, rude, egotistical, pushy... the sorts of traits that in most religions spirituality tends to counter.
But then Islam isn't really a religion... It's simply totalitarianism, like Nazism and fascism, from a time before the notion of the absence of any god caught hold.