"Many said that since islam has a better view of Mary than most "protestants", they were closer to being "Christian". Now that is balderdash, but if I wanted to start throwing mud on this issue, it would be very easy to spin it the other way."
You stumbled across an interesting theological comment which points to an equally interesting religious phenomenon which is seen in Lebanon, Syria and the Holy Land. Alawites and some Shia have a profound devotion to the Theotokos. There are Marian shrines throughout the region where Mohammedans pray right along side Orthodox Christians for her intervention. It is of course, from a Sunni Mohammedan pov, syncretism of the highest order, but there it is. I know Lebanese Orthodox Christians who say that many Shia are "almost Christians" because of this and the Alawites are, derisively, called "Little Christians" by the Sunnis.
I don't think you could spin this the other way with any success even if you wanted to. These pieces of ancient Christianity which persist among the Mohammedans of that region are clearly relics of the Orthodox past of their ancestors. It is not an indication that Christianity learned Marian devotion from the Mohammedans. The timeline is all wrong. In this sense its like the comment once made to me by a WS Lutheran priest who attended one of our Lenten devotions during which we say the Prayer of +Ephraim the Syrian. That prayer involves full body prostrations. He said that we must have picked that up from the Mohammedans. Well, we do look like a bunch of Mohammedans when we say that prayer, but they got it from us, not the other way around.
LOL! The thing that always amuses me is how many people are ignorant of the fact that Islam simply used some of the Byzantine Christian religious practices common in its part of the world, the Middle East, in its picking and chosing of things for its syncretist cult. Part of this, of course, is because Muslims themselves are somewhat like the old USSR, where the Russians kept announcing that they had invented everything from electricity on up, despite irrefutable evidence that these things had been invented long before the USSR came into being.
Muslim doctrine gets around its recent arrival on the religious historical sceene by declaring that everyone is "born" Muslim, and that even historical figures who lived before Islam were therefore Muslims. It seems that they, unfortunately, have found many Westerners who are only too happy (or maybe ignorant enough) to give Islam credit for all sorts of things it could never possibly have done.