Islam, in its heyday was far more tolerant of other religions than was Christianity at the same time period. Both had been tied in with the state almost from their inception.
After Islam conquered large parts of Eurasia and Africa, and settled down to rule their domains, Islamic rulers permitted Christians, Jews, and others to practice their religions, and to live in peace, albeit as second class citizens and subject to a poll tax.
Christianity went through disasterous convulsions until tolerance became the norm, and then only after the establishment of the United States.
By the end of the middle ages, both Islam and Christianity had become militantly intolerant, slaughtering unbelievers and heretics, with Jews as targets of opportunity from the crusades onward. Only in the Ottoman Empire and Poland were Jews permitted to live in peace.
In the Christian West, one of the positive aspects of the Enlightenment was the emancipation of Jews. It was Napoleon who ordered the opening of the ghettos of Europe, reducing the oppression of Jews on account of their religion, but the nationalist backlash made Jews targets on account of their race.
While Christianity matured, and became less tied to the state, Islam went the opposite way in many of its domains. Spain, under the fanatical Almohades, became much less tolerant of other religions, while Persia was always subject to fits of religious fanatacism, even before Islam. (Moses Maimonides’ family fled Almohade Spain for Egypt, where Maimonides became court physician to Saladin.) The book of Esther describes on such episode, and there were several under the Sassanids, and this explains a lot about recent Iranian history.
The rise of Wahhabism in the nineteenth century kept Islam tied to the state and politics, which is always a dangerous combination, one recognized by our First Amendment. As a result, tolerant (moderate) Islam is rare. The decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the resulting rule of large Islamic areas by Western nations kept the pot boiling.
Until Islam has the same kind of enlightenment as Christianity had, I doubt we will see many “moderate Muslims.”
Woah! It would take Christianity centuries to become tied to a state! The tenets of Christianity are opposed to the very abuses that were tied to it through state intervention. Christians then have gone *back* to Christ’s teachings.
Islam however has *always* been anti-Jew and rooted in conquest.
"Moderate" is simply a euphemism for "lapsed" or "secular". In medieval Christianity a "moderate" was called a "heretic" or "apostate" and that's precisely how the Umma view "moderate" muslims today.